PDF Editor: PDF shows empty when switching to different templates

Greetings,

We would like to highlight a long-standing and frustrating bug in the PDF editor that continues to affect our workflow.

We maintain over four different PDF templates for the same forms. Occasionally, when updating one of the templates, an unexpected and unexplained behavior occurs: a different, untouched template becomes completely empty—all form fields are removed, and only the background image remains.

To mitigate this issue, our current workaround is to maintain a backup copy of each template. In case one gets corrupted, we can quickly switch to its backup to avoid delays.

We hope this issue can be addressed soon, as it significantly impacts template reliability and efficiency.

Best regards,
Ali Ahmed

Hi Ali,

Thanks for reaching out to Jotform Support. I cloned your form and tested it to see if I could replicate the issue, but everything was working properly. Check out the screenshot below to see my result:

Like what you see in the screenshot above, the submission PDF isn't blank. I understand that you mentioned the issue is happening occasionally, does it mean that if you come back next time, the data is there? Also, is the issue happening on all submissions of the form?

Once we hear back from you, we'll be able to help you with this.

Hello Chris_L,

While we understand that this issue may be difficult to reproduce consistently, we suggest trying the following scenario to observe the problem:

Try modifying the fields in the UAE template, then switch to the BH template and make additional changes. After switching between templates and making a few edits, you may suddenly find that one of the templates—whether BH, QA, SA, or UAE—loses all of its fields, leaving only the background image intact.

If it's possible to review the edit history of the BH template, you may notice that it became completely empty twice over the past week. In both cases, we had to manually rebuild all the fields from scratch.

We hope this helps in identifying the root cause of the issue.

Best regards,
Ali

Hello Ali,

I cloned your form and tested it to see if I could replicate the issue, but everything was working properly. Check out the screencast below to see my results: Can you share with us a screen recording of what’s happening so we can try to replicate it on our end? You can share the video recording on any public sharing platform like Google Drive or Dropbox, or you can simply use Loom to record the video and share the video link with us.

Once we hear back from you, we'll be able to move forward with a solution.