Participant

Question

Help uploading (or linking to) a fillable PDF form on website

Forum|Forum|12 years ago
October 24, 2013
2 replies
19523 views

Hi,

Could anyone help me out by telling me how I best go about uploading, or placing a link to, a fillable PDF form I created in Adobe Acrobat Pro on to a website page please?

I have searched Google extensively and also these forums and have got nowhere with it so far. Do I need to upload the PDF to our hosting server?

One of the results I found on these forums led me to a thread which contained a link to this (http://www.idc-oregon.org/_dwnlds/IDC-Membership2010Drive.pdf) PDF form, and this is exactly how I want my form to open from a link on our web page.

I have read that embedding the form isn't a great choice because users on certain browsers may face difficulties seeing the PDF, so I think linking to it is the best option. But not being very experienced doing this, I'm unsure where I upload the PDF to in order to link to it.

Thanks.

This topic has been closed for replies.

Nancy OShea

Community Expert

Another wrinkle with PDF forms is the version of Acrobat used to create the document. For example, if you used Acrobat X to create your forms, users with older versions of the software may have trouble with your form. I have encountered this a few times with Govt Forms. A major hassle.

Jon gave you good advice here. HTML forms can be used by anyone. No plugins or other software required. This lessens the burden for you & your site visitors by providing a very straight forward way for people to communicate with you.

Nancy O.

Nancy O'Shea— Product User & Community Expert

S

supas33k3rAuthor

Participant

Thanks Jon. So you would you recommend the latter option you mention (forcing the PDF into a file download then linking it to our site)? If so, which hosting website is most recommended for uploading the PDF zip to which I can then link to on our website?

Thanks also Nancy O, I take your point on board. Having got nowhere in my own research as to how I would upload or link to our fillable PDF on our site it's looking increasingly likely this idea may have to be abandoned - which is incredible hard to swallow as I spent some time putting it together.

Our form is a payment form and includes sensitive information such as bank details - would a HTML form be able to provide the same sort of security if I was to go down this route?

Nancy OShea

Community Expert

Our form is a payment form and includes sensitive information such as bank details

OMG! PDF and HTML forms are not secure.

http://forums.adobe.com/thread/927451

Nancy O.

Nancy O'Shea— Product User & Community Expert

Jon Fritz

Community Expert

PDF forms don't work well online unless you KNOW all of your viewers have their systems set a specific way.

Depending on a viewer's settings, PDFs can either display in the browser, display in Acrobat or simply download to their machine. There is no way to control what happens when you link to a PDF in your web page unless you can control all of the viewer's machines that will see it (company intranet for instance).

You will be much, much better off re-creating the PDF using HTML Form Elements within DW on a standard .html page. Then, depending on what your server supports, attaching that form.html page to a server-side form processing script.

If your server supports PHP, I suggest a premade script like Formmail from http://www.tectite.com. It is a very robust script with many optional features for things like security, file upload, etc. Their website also gives you a ton of info on how to implement it.

S

supas33k3rAuthor

Participant

Thanks for your reply.

I can see what you're saying and have taken your comments on board.

I was hoping to be able to get it so that the PDF opens like the one that does in the link I posted in my original post. Is there a simple way to do this, if so; how?

Jon Fritz

Community Expert

Nope, as I said, there is no way to control what happens when a viewer clicks on a .pdf link unless you contol their machine. There is no code that will make a pdf display in a browser that is not set to display it.

You can link to a PDF as if it were any other page on your site and one of three things will happen when the user clicks the link...

1. It opens in the browser, like yours is set

2. It opens in Acrobat (or some other program the user has set to read PDFs)

3. It downloads and is placed in the viewer's Downloads folder

The opposite is not the case though, you can force a PDF into a file download by first compressing it into a .zip or .sit file first. Then link to that file on your site. When the viewer clicks the link, it will automatically initiate a file download where they will need to decompress it.

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