SUMMARY STEPS TO REPRODUCE 1. open the attached pdf and show the form. 2. click some of the checkboxes in the lower part of the form (column with header "richtig" oder "falsch" - this works fine with this version 3. now hide the form again OBSERVED RESULT it is not visible which checkboxes have been checked. EXPECTED RESULT you can see which checkboxes have been check when form is hidden again (in acrobat you can see that) - see attached screenshots. SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS Windows: Windows 10 Okular Version 1.11.1 from the windows store.
Created attachment 134983 [details] Okuklar 1.11.1 with forms enabled -> ok
Created attachment 134984 [details] Okular 1.11.1 with forms disabled again -> selection is not visible anymore
Created attachment 134985 [details] Acrobat Reader - just for comparison The checkboxes in this case look much nicer - but that is a different story.
Also the Acrobat reader does not display any text, but just big checkboxes - it would be nice if the same could be achieved for okular.
Can we have the actual file?
Created attachment 135027 [details] PDF file showing the problem Sorry for the missing attachment - i have attached the file now.
Probably an issue in poppler, but needs investigation.
I have reproduced this issue with Okular 20.12.2 and Poppler 21.03.0. I opened the "PDF file showing the problem" in Okular, clicked "Show forms" ticked a box, hide the forms and saved the file. The box no longer shows up after hiding the forms. I further confirmed that Evince, which is also based on poppler fails to show the checked box. In fact, clicking any other box in Evince will also fail to show. Finally, I confirmed that opening the modified PDF in either Master PDF Editor [1] or Firefox 86 does show the ticked box. Thus I agree with Albert that this is most likely a poppler bug. @Andreas, would you like to report the bug at https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler/-/issues/ ? [1] https://code-industry.net/masterpdfeditor/ a proprietary PDF software with Linux support
I opened a related bug at https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=433979 which however, unlike the current one, is not reproducible with Evince.
I filed a bug on a similar problem, with radio buttons: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=442849 It appears forms are badly broken. I have even seen, in every version up to 21.08.1, text entry boxes that won't display the user entered text, if it's after a radio button or check mark box.
Just for future reference, it seems that Andreas did file a bug report for poppler: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler/-/issues/1055
After 2 years with this annoying bug, all I can do is continue using browsers to work with PDFs with forms.
looks like i am not the only one annoyed by the bug -> shall collect some money to sponsor the work/fix ? => https://discuss.kde.org/c/development/sponsored-work/31
Okular works just fine when I use the flatpak version of it and it shows the checkboxes in pdf forms when you unhide the "form fields". But in the native arch linux version it does not work. I really hope this gets fixed. Super annoying bug.