There are plenty of resources available that can show you how to fill out PDF forms correctly. Our 24/7 customer service experts are awesome! And you get to speak to a real person any day, any time. Just select the fields you want to include in your form, and we’ll take care of the rest.įinally, don’t hesitate to reach out for help if you’re having trouble. You don’t need any design or programming skills to get started. Our easy-to-use PDF editor lets you create fillable PDF forms with just a few clicks. This will help you understand where to input the information and how the form is structured. Second, take some time to familiarize yourself with the form before you start filling it out. Plus, Foxit PDF Editor makes it easy to distribute your form electronically and collect responses electronically, so you can save time and paper. You can also design the form layout and appearance to match your brand or style. It will allow you to easily add text boxes, drop-down menus, push buttons, text fields, check boxes, combo boxes, list boxes and radio buttons to your PDF form and specify their properties that make it easy to input information. First tip is having the right tool:įoxit PDF Editor is the best choice for this task. However, there are a few easy tips that can make filling out PDF forms a breeze. Drop in your files to merge, convert, edit, compress PDFs & much more - completely. The format is often not user-friendly, and it can be difficult to figure out how to input the information correctly. PDF Online gives you free, secure & accurate tools to work with PDFs. If I'm mistaken here, please let me know in a comment.Anyone who has ever tried to fill out a PDF form knows how frustrating it can be. The latter two points will be true for all the tools and utilities mentioned in the other answers to this question. Adobe PDF readers will refuse to 'fill+save' forms created with non-Adobe products (they will 'fill+print' them however).Non-Adobe PDF Readers will not be able to 'fill+save' forms created with Adobe products (they can 'fill+print' them however).The technical mechanism behind this is that Adobe digitally sign their form documents with their own key (which is known to the Adobe Reader, and which you agreed to not reverse engineer when you accepted the Adobe Reader EULA.). PDF Creator and PDF Converter, with a comprehensive suite of PDF productivity tools.
Adobe Reader does only support to fill PDF forms which were created by an Adobe product (and which have been assigned 'extended rights' so Reader can indeed save the formdata alongside the document).Īdobe Reader will not work with PDF forms you created with or LibreOffice ('work' in the sense of: 'allows you to fill+save the form data'.). Annotate or review PDFs - Effortlessly add or edit ink, free text. NOTE, however: Adobe uses an own proprietary way to create and fill PDF forms. Now your PDF form will be editable (and saveable!) with any non-Adobe PDF viewer. When you're finished with your document, use File -> Export as PDF with the checkbox Create PDF form enabled. To create the initial form elements in the *.odt documents, enable the View -> Toolbars -> Form Controls tools, which allow you to add clickable checkboxes + radiobuttons, fillable text fields, pushbuttons and some more to the page(s).
You can create fillable form PDFs using as well as LibreOffice. I've got the nasty feeling that what I want is fundamentally impossible except using Adobe's own rights management tools. Unfortunately, it looks like Reader cannot save filled-in data to the forms generated by iText (or generated by OO Writer).
I'm wondering if anyone has has good experiences with alternatives? Either software libraries or products?ĮDIT - Thanks, matt b - I'd seen iText before but didn't know it could create forms.
That's fine and it basically works (except then Pro users can't save their data - WTF?).īecause I am getting frustrated, I would ideally like to avoid Adobe products altogether (that is on the design side, for the users Reader is still a necessity or I would just do it as a db-backed web form). For those who have not experienced the many frustrations of Acrobat - by default, Reader cannot fill in a form unless it was created using Acrobat Pro >8.0 and has specifically enabled usage rights. The trick is that they need to be fillable using Adobe Reader. So this form would be for data collection, rather than report generation which seems to be the common scenario for pdf-related questions on SO. Are there any good alternatives to Adobe Acrobat for creating interactive PDFs? The terminology is a little fuzzy here - by interactive, I mean "able to be filled in", and not necessarily "scriptable".