Suggestions for creating problem-free, fillable PDFs???

Forum|Forum|5 years ago
January 29, 2021
2 replies
863 views

I've been designing hardcopy forms (usually in Adobe Illustrator) for clients for many years. Progressively, several of them have been asking for fillable PDF versions. It was working ok at first, but lately, I'm getting all kinds of feedback about filled forms not being able to be copy and pasted from (all fields locked) when my clients get forms back from their customers. Or my FAVORITE one - if someone simply opened one of their PDFs in Apple's "Preview" program, all the feild tabs are no longer present when my client gets the form back into their Acrobat.

I've looked everywhere for alternative tools for creating fillable forms, but everything is just clunky and "microsoft word" looking.

Any tips to keep things in the adobe ecosystem would be greatly appreciated.

This topic has been closed for replies.

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wgznAuthor

Participating Frequently

One variable here, I'm working on a Mac. While I understand that the platform wars are mostly over, I know that there are still roadbumps here and there. I have to wonder if I created these on a Windows machine if some of this might go away...?

Joel Geraci

Community Expert

Nope. Also, for the record, Macs are the best platform to run Windows. Most of the problems that people encounter with Windows aren't due to the operating system. The problems are with the 3rd party drivers for all of the crummy hardware that the manufacturers are putting in the machines.

Run Windows on Apple hardware and you can run it for months without needing to reboot or having it crash on you.

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wgznAuthor

Participating Frequently

I don't want to sound unappreciative, but can we keep the comments here explicitly within context of the subject. I'm not interested here in how best to operate either platform, I know from experience there are STILL problems sometimes with things like fonts when you move a document from mac to win or vice versa - and of course the KNOWN issue of more or less destroying tab features if a PDF is opened in Apple's Preview.

I'm just wondering if creating PDFs on a mac sets us up for problems once they are moved to a windows environment.

Joel Geraci

Community Expert

The problem isn't the PDFs. It's the inconsistencies in the PDF viewers. The only way to control the way the form is being filled is to control the viewer. Take a look at Adobe Embed API. It's a free PDF viewer you can use to embed PDF in your HTML and enforce a single experience and it allows for form filling.

https://www.adobe.io/apis/documentcloud/dcsdk/pdf-embed.html

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wgznAuthor

Participating Frequently

Yeah, I thought about online options. But most of my clients asking for this are CPAs. And both they and their customers are usually, [and understandably] leery about entering very sensitive financial nformation into a browser.

Joel Geraci

Community Expert

I'll bet they use Quickbooks though 🙂

I know my CPA does.

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