How to make forms editable online

Report · Oct 27, 2016

The question is if there is a fairly simple way to make distributed PDF forms editable online, so that they don't have to be downloaded.

A second question is if there is an existing script which, when attached to a button, will notify the sender that the form is approved as is, so that the recipient doesn't need to send the identical form back to the sender.

Report · Oct 28, 2016

- Not possible. In order to view a PDF file it has to be downloaded first, even if just as a temporary file (which is what happens when you open a PDF inside a browser window).

- You can create such a button yourself with a script the performs the form validation and reports the results to the user.

There's no built-in function that does that for you, except for the validation of the "Required" fields, which occurs automatically when the file is submitted back.

Report · Oct 28, 2016

Thanks very much for responding! Much appreciated--it will save me the time I would have spent trying to do something that can't be done.

Adobe is missing the boat on this; all collaboration is online these days. If I send a PDF to someone to review and edit and they have to download it, hoping they have the right app to access it, mess around with fonts (hoping the ones they have installed are compatible), and then figure out how to return the edited PDF (do I email it? do I put it back in Adobe Cloud, wherever that is?), the response time wasted on unnecessary actions is significant. So I will end up not using Acrobat for these kinds of interactions--it's just too unwieldy. They need to develop an online Acrobat to which you can upload an existing form, which is accessible and editable to whoever has the link, complete with notification functions. So many people work at Adobe it just boggles the mind that they haven't developed this yet.