Forms

[kenk24401987]

I work for an organization that has dozens of forms from different departments. We'd like to be able to provide both hard copies to some of our customers, but an online fillable version for other customers.

Does anyone know of a way to do this without providing a link to a fillable PDF? Some of our less tech-savvy customers have an issue with downloading the PDF (they try to fill out the linked document rather than saving a copy), so we'd like to make our forms available directly on our website. I can build the forms in Wordpress, but then I have to recreate them as a printable document in some other program.

Is any one aware of a quick and easy solution to this dilema?

[Thom Parker]

The answer is "Yes, Kind of, Maybe".  To be viewed, a PDF needs to be loaded into a viewer. For form operations it needs to be a good viewer that does proper form handling. This seems obvious, but the problem is that while there are many different viewers, and the main HTML browsers have thier own PDF viewers, these viewers are mostly crap, and this is doubly true for mobile devices. That's not to say there aren't some good viewers for particular platforms. But if you can't control what your users are using,  then you need a general purpose solution for accesing PDFs from a web site by anyone with any browser on any device. That's a tall order. 

Adobe does have a solution for this scenario, but I don't know how well it handles forms. I suspect that if it does handle forms it doesn't implement interactive scripts.

https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2019/12/13/embed-pdf-viewing-into-web-apps-using-adobe-document-cl...

There are also some similar 3rd party solutions, but I don't know anything about them. Do a google search on "PDF Web Viewer"