Registry

AO 440 — programmatic fill compatibility

Summons in a Civil Action · Administrative Office of the US Courts · Rev. 06/12. Tested 2026-08-06 on the unmodified upstream blank — every number below comes from a recorded run, not from documentation.

Verdict at a glance

Tool	Version	Result	Detail
pdfops API	hosted, tested 2026-08-06	verified + deterministic flatten	31/31 supported fields landed; flatten=true byte-deterministic (sha256 89a7ad9f10b6…)
pdf-lib	1.17.1	verified (31/31)	31 fields filled in-process
@cantoo/pdf-lib (fork)	2.6.5	verified (31/31)	31 fields filled in-process
pypdf	6.15.0	text fields verified (29/29)	29 text fields written and re-read (text fields only)
pdftk-java	3.3.3	verified (31/31)	31 fields filled via FDF and re-dumped
qpdf --check	11.9.0	warnings	WARNING: public/registry/blank/uscourts-ao-440.pdf: page 1: shared object 119: in hint table but not computed list \| qpdf: operation succeeded with warnings
poppler render check	24.02.0	values render (29/29)	29/29 filled text values present in pdftotext output of the pdf-lib-filled file; page-1 raster sha256 afb42d2b185c…

File facts

Source: https://www.uscourts.gov/sites/default/files/ao440.pdf (issuer page: here)
Blank tested: uscourts-ao-440.pdf · 25 KB · sha256 2df4ff1d30d123b8a3591d158816940712e0da0189b47ca0abf780579895fbae
License: US federal government work — public domain (17 U.S.C. § 105). The hash-verified blank is redistributed here unmodified.
Structure: 2 pages · AcroForm
Fields: 34 (29 text, 3 button, 1 dropdown, 1 checkbox)

Quirks & limitations

The cleanest form in this corpus — a well-behaved AcroForm with no XFA layer, no encryption, and a dropdown of US district courts. A good first target when testing a fill pipeline end-to-end.
Litigation tooling fills these in bulk — one summons per defendant.
The court dropdown is a combo box whose option list is the full set of district-court names; setting a value not in the list is rejected by strict fillers.

Tested request

This exact shape ran against the live API during the recorded test (values here shortened to two fields; the test filled all 31 supported fields). With flatten=true, two identical runs produced byte-identical output — sha256 89a7ad9f10b67c71024cf69ecb8e7cc87ac542ee52dccbdd8bd08628593109da.

curl -X POST https://pdfops.dev/api/fill-form \
  -F "pdf=@uscourts-ao-440.pdf" \
  -F 'fields={"Date_Today":"Jane Doe","Plaintiff":"Jane Doe"}' \
  -F "flatten=true" \
  -o filled.pdf

Enumerate all 34 field names first with the inspector or POST /api/inspect.

Field schema

All 34 fields (name, type, maxLength, options)

Field name	Type	Options
`Dist.Info`	Dropdown	95 options
`Date_Today`	TextField
`Plaintiff`	TextField
`Defendant`	TextField
`Defendant address`	TextField
`Plaintiff address`	TextField
`Deputy Clerk Signature`	TextField
`Civil action number`	TextField
`Button.Print1`	Button
`Button.SaveAs`	Button
`Button.Reset`	Button
`Date_Received`	TextField
`Place Served2`	TextField
`Method`	CheckBox
`Left With2`	TextField
`Date_Served1`	TextField
`Served On`	TextField
`Organization2`	TextField
`Other`	TextField
`Travel Fee`	TextField
`Date_Today2`	TextField
`Server Signature`	TextField
`Server Name`	TextField
`Server Address`	TextField
`Additional information`	TextField
`Defendant2`	TextField
`Place Served`	TextField
`Date_Served`	TextField
`Left With`	TextField
`Organization`	TextField
`Date_Served2`	TextField
`Unexecuted Reason`	TextField
`Service Fee`	TextField
`Total Fee`	TextField

Frequently asked

Can I fill the AO 440 programmatically?

Yes — the blank Rev. 06/12 AO 440 is a fillable AcroForm with 34 fields. In our tested run, all 31 supported fields were filled through the pdfops API and verified by re-inspecting the output; upstream pdf-lib also round-trips it, and pypdf handled its text fields. Field names are listed in the schema on this page.

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