June 24, 2004

Curious, George: Filling in PDF forms Why can't I fill out PDF forms directly on my Mac? Why must I print them out and fill them in by hand? (More inside)

In the past, when I downloaded PDF forms, I would swear I sometimes filled them out by running Adobe Acrobat Reader and typing directly into them; nowadays, I seem to have to print them out, and then hand-write the information on the appropriate lines. Are fewer places making their PDF forms typable, or am I doing something differently? More importantly,are there any free or ultra-cheap programs that will let me type directly onto PDF documents? So far, I've found PDFPen and FormMate, but I haven't yet resigned myself to paying $25 or more for what seems like it should be a simple hack.

posted by jacobw 20 years ago
  • Are you certain you're opening them in Adobe Reader? I support about 200 Macs, and we consistantly have this problem: people are opening PDFs in MacOS X's "Preview" application instead of Adobe Reader. Preview is a much nicer program in every respect - except you can't input text into PDF forms, which is a bummer. It's the only reason we still include Adobe Reader in our faculty/staff/lab disk images. This might be a bit too obvious a fix (or you may still be running MacOS 9, in which case this doesn't apply) but it's worth investigating. If that doesn't fix it, then try deleting the Adobe Reader application; then go to your home directory and, in ~/Library/Application Support, remove any Adobe Reader references. Try reinstalling and see if that does the trick. (You may also want to empty your ~/Library/Caches directory and remove the Adobe Reader preferences from your ~/Library/Preferences folder.) In any case, there's something wrong with your setup - you certainly do NOT need to pay anything to be able to fill in Acrobat forms.
  • This is slightly off topic, but if you can get your hands on version 5 of Adobe (for osx), you can save those forms you filled out as pdfs (it's an option when you select print). The option disappeared when I upgraded to 6, so I switched back.
  • Floach, thanks for the help. I am definitely using Adobe Reader. I, too, have kept Reader around exclusively for typing into forms--it's just that, lately, it hasn't seemed to want to do it. I took your advice and cleared out my Adobe-related caches and the like, and reinstalled--but it's still not working. However, what's puzzling is that I opened up an old PDF file on my computer, and I was able to enter info into it using reader. But I still can't enter text into--say--this PDF file. This leads me to assume that there is some "Enable People To Enter Text" switch that people need to flip when creating a PDF file, and that whoever created the troublesome file failed to do it. Am I right, or is there some problem at my end? I should note that both PDFPen and ForMate are capable of inserting text into this particular file--but, like I said, I'm hoping for a free (or very cheap) alternative.
  • It's the document, not your computer. The people who created that form were too lazy to put form fields in it.
  • I wish this wasn't a Mac question. I'm a Windows user too and I hate getting PDF Social Security, IRS forms, etc, only to have to fill them out by hand. What's with this disconnect?
  • Make sure that you have version 6.02 of Adobe Reader. Adobe changed some parts of the PDF 'standard' and so PDFs made with Acrobat 6 are not in all respects compatible with Reader 5. But Reader 5 will still read them and won't tell you that you need a newer version. It sucks, as does Acrobat anyway. Period.
  • Minda is right.
  • Thanks for the help, all. Look like I'm stuck either filling out most forms by hand, or paying the $25 for FormMate. Ah, cruel, cruel world!