Borders generated in PDF Template using Java Apache PdfBox

In the nearest future I will be developing a PDF generating service. It’s all about a simple template being filled using data coming from request.
During my research I heard about Apache PDFBox and at the moment I am testing it – looks very handy, but I have some annoying problem – when the PDF is generated it has this strange, gray borders.
I made a research and did not found the way to get rid of them.

My sample DataDTO:

@Data
public class DocumentDataDto {
    private int documentNumber;
    private LocalDate date;
    private String creatorFirstName;
    private String creatorLastName;
}

Sample controller:

@RestController
@RequiredArgsConstructor
public class PdfController {
    private final PdfService pdfService;

    @PostMapping(value = "/generatePdf")
    public ResponseEntity<ByteArrayResource> generatePdf(@RequestBody DocumentDataDto data) {
        ByteArrayResource pdf = pdfService.generatePdf(data);

        HttpHeaders headers = new HttpHeaders();
        headers.add(HttpHeaders.CONTENT_DISPOSITION, "inline; filename=generated.pdf");
        headers.add(HttpHeaders.CONTENT_TYPE, "application/pdf");

        return ResponseEntity.ok()
                .headers(headers)
                .contentLength(pdf.contentLength())
                .body(pdf);
    }
}

Sample service:

@Service
public class PdfService {

    public ByteArrayResource generatePdf(DocumentDataDto data) {
        try {
            ClassPathResource pdfResource = new ClassPathResource("templates/template1.pdf");

            try (InputStream inputStream = pdfResource.getInputStream();
                 PDDocument document = PDDocument.load(inputStream)) {

                PDAcroForm form = document.getDocumentCatalog().getAcroForm();

                if (form != null) {
                    PDField field = form.getField("Text1");
                    if (field != null) {
                        field.setValue(String.valueOf(data.getDocumentNumber()));
                    }

                    field = form.getField("Text2");
                    if (field != null) {
                        field.setValue(String.valueOf(data.getDate()));
                    }

                    field = form.getField("Text3");
                    if (field != null) {
                        field.setValue(data.getCreatorFirstName() + " " + data.getCreatorLastName());
                    }

                    ByteArrayOutputStream byteArrayOutputStream = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
                    document.save(byteArrayOutputStream);

                    return new ByteArrayResource(byteArrayOutputStream.toByteArray());
                }
            }
        } catch (IOException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
        return new ByteArrayResource(new byte[0]);
    }
}

*NOTE: The code above is just a sample – I am aware that there should be some exception handling instead of returning empty byte array 🙂 *

My PDF template looks simple as that:

Created using https://www.pdfescape.com

I have tried to remove the styles from AcroForm, as well as making them invisible. Unfortunately, no one of my approaches helped. The final output was always like:

output

I have to admit, that is my first time of creating such a service for PDF.
If you have any advices, please let me know – maybe there are more straight-forward ways to achieve the PDF file filled with pure text?

Much appreciate all help!

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