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Hi,
Rakesh Sorathiya.
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The Acrobat SDK can't create fillable forms. For this you need Adobe Acrobat.
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By "View SDK" do you mean Adobe's "PDF Embed API" (not a part of the Acrobat SDK)? Or something else?
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Hi,
We have a requirement where we need to populate editable fields in PDF with our data.
The problem when we open the pdf we are not able to identify the input fields.
Q1: Is there any way we can identify the input fields in pdf ? We should be able to pick and update its value programmatically
We were trying one way in which we are creating the pdf content in Word and then trying to convert it to pdf which should contain all prefilled data.
Q2: Do we have any API/utility that helps us convert the .docx file to editable PDF or .pdf ?
Thank you
Rakesh Sorathiya
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In Adobe Acrobat use Tools > Prepare Form and you will see the form fields.
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Ok, if you are new to PDF forms here are some things you may need.
* "Editable" is nothing in PDF terms, and is not used to talk about fillable forms.
* "Fillable forms" are specially prepared with "form fields", each with a name and a place on the page.
* Fillable forms must be made in Acrobat or some other special app, such as InDesign.
* A PDF just saved from Word may look like a paper form but it is NOT a fillable form, there will be no form fields.
* A "prepare form" function in Acrobat will try to recognise where you want fields and make fillable forms; this is always the starting point for a careful manual process. Not part of an automated workflow.
* A prepared form CANNOT be prefilled; that's just not what happens. The form is made for someone else to fill, NOT already filled.
* If you have a Word document that already has filled in data you need an entirely different workflow, not involving PDF forms. Probably best finished and solved in Word, PDF will make everything orders of magnitude harder.
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> * A prepared form CANNOT be prefilled; that's just not what happens. The form is made for someone else to fill, NOT already filled.
Why not? It can certainly happen that an empty form is created in advance with empty form fields and before sending it to the user you would pre-fill it with data relevant for that user, to save them from entering already-known information. This is not an uncommon workflow.
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Perhaps I didn't express that clearly. By "prepared form" I mean "a PDF file that has been through the automatic prepare form function". It's just not designed to do that. Clearly, it could then be filled before sending it on, but I think the workflow proposed here is really an attempt to scrape data from existing Word forms.