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Participant
April 22, 2020
Question

How do I save a fillable pdf and make it unfillable after saving it?

  • April 22, 2020
  • 2 replies
  • 3845 views

How do I make a fillable pdf so that when I save it,  the fillable areas will be unfillable.

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2 replies

Thom Parker
Community Expert
Community Expert
April 27, 2020

There are several ways to make a form unfillable. The easiest is to use a script to set all the fields to Read Only. This can be done with a script on the PDF. The problem is determining when to do it. Do you want this to happen every time the form is saved? or only when the form is complete? 

One technique is to lock the fields on a digital signature. The signature field has a special action just for this. 

 

Anohter technique is to flatten the form. But this can only be done from a folder level script, i.e. a script installed into Acrobat. So this one only works for you, not anyone else filling out the form.  

Thom Parker - Software Developer at PDFScriptingUse the Acrobat JavaScript Reference early and often
ls_rbls
Community Expert
Community Expert
April 23, 2020

Hi,

 

You  can accomplish this by adding a button with a javascript action to the form, creating a new action with the action wizard tool and running a javascript manually, or as a batch sequence.

 

Also I've seen this question answered before, where the solution implements a signature field in the form.

 

When this field is signed,  it saves the  whole document as read only.

 

 

 

In addition, you may also consider to protect the document from editing with password.