Could not find page for PDFRef Error during flatten

[makarov-roman]

What were you trying to do?

flatten document.

How did you attempt to do it?

example to reproduce below

What actually happened?

crash on flatten call

Error: Could not find page for PDFRef 220 0 R
    at PDFForm.findWidgetPage (/home/roman/Projects/monorepo/packages/lambdas/pdfService/node_modules/pdf-lib/cjs/api/form/PDFForm.js:603:23)
    at PDFForm.flatten (/home/roman/Projects/monorepo/packages/lambdas/pdfService/node_modules/pdf-lib/cjs/api/form/PDFForm.js:458:33)

What did you expect to happen?

not having a crash

How can we reproduce the issue?

const { PDFCheckBox, PDFDocument, PDFTextField } = require('pdf-lib');
const fs = require('fs');

const fill = async () => {
  try {
    const Body = fs.readFileSync(
      'internshipApplicationForFurtherEducation.pdf',
    );

    const pdfDoc = await PDFDocument.load(Body);
    const form = pdfDoc.getForm();
    form.flatten();

    const result = await pdfDoc.save({ useObjectStreams: true });
    fs.writeFileSync('result.pdf', result);
  } catch (e) {
    console.error(e);
    throw e;
  }
};
fill();

file

Version

1.17.1

What environment are you running pdf-lib in?

Node

Checklist

• My report includes a Short, Self Contained, Correct (Compilable) Example.
• I have attached all PDFs, images, and other files needed to run my SSCCE.

Additional Notes

In our project I have around 30 different pdfs and only 2 has such issue. Not sure if it's corrupted metadata or something else. Before it was working with pdftk.

[makarov-roman]

I've made minor patch to ignore this error inside flatten and findWidgetPage functions and result doc look fine. So my assumption is that some editor left broken meta-data, thus pdflib "see" widget, but cannot find it on page. Ideally we should check it during load and clean such broken widgets/refs.
I'll publish the workaround tomorrow.

[makarov-roman]

here is my workaround
you can test it via @visaright/pdf-lib npm package. (you can use package with caution, cause it will be removed after the issue is properly fixed in the mainstream)