I have created an interactive form using Adobe Acrobat Pro on a Windows 7 machine. Afterwards I tried using it on an iPad and the Click to Reset form does weird things, and the pages do not display properly "too small".

Report · May 04, 2016

I have created an interactive form using Adobe Acrobat Pro on a Windows 7 machine. Afterwards I tried using it on an iPad and the Click to Reset form does weird things, and the pages do not display properly "too small", does anyone have any advice on how to create a form on a Windows machine that works properly with IOS?

Report · May 04, 2016

What PDF viewer are you using on iOS? Note that Adobe Reader supports some forms features, but not everything. Support for JavaScript is very limited. The best PDF viewer on iOS for forms is Readdle's PDF Expert.

Report · May 05, 2016

I am using Adobe Acrobat to open the file on my iPad and iPhone. I also tried opening the file on a MAC and almost everything worked properly except the "check boxes with check marks" were now showing up as "0" instead. It seems that PDF doesn't play well across multiple platforms as advertised.

Report · May 05, 2016

It depends a lot on which PDF viewer you are using.

There are many PDF viewers out there which can display more or less properly a plain PDF (but if there are some overprinting or transparency pieces on the page, they may already fail). The PDF viewing components of the web browsers fall into this category.

There are some who can actually display form fields, and allow entering data. Most of them do well, but there are some (actually, one in particular, namely Preview.app on OSX) which horrendously mess up the document when writing back.

And then, there are few which do understand some actions and (Acrobat) JavaScript. The leader is Adobe Acrobat (because it is the PDF viewer with the longest history). However, as good as Acrobat is on Windows and Mac, it anything but that on iOS and Android. In fact, it is about the dumbest PDF viewer understanding a little bit of JavaScript.

It is kind of common understanding that the leader for iOS is PDFExpert by Readdle, and for Android qPDF Notes Pro by Quoppa Software. Adobe completely missed the "mobile devices" train for PDF viewers.

The conclusion is that you have to be aware of which PDF viewer your users are using, and you will have to create your forms for the dumbest one. You may actually end up in delivering your form dumbed down, and have a mechanism which activates the intelligent parts of your form when it opens, and the PDF viewer understands the command to do that.

Report · May 05, 2016

Thanks for the help maxwyss, I will give PDFExpert a try. Is there any particular version you recommend? In the App store there is a free PDF Expert Enterprise version, and a PDF Expert 5 version for $9.99.

Report · May 05, 2016

You will need PDF Expert 5. If I remember correctly, the Enterprise version requires some back-end support.

In order to see what PDF Expert supports JavaScript-wise, have a look at their support page.