Create fill-in PDF forms to save & email
I want to use OpenOffice.org to produce some forms for students to fill in and email to their instructors. I want these forms to be in PDF so students can use Adobe Reader (or any other PDF viewer with form-filling capability, if there are any, or any browser equipped with the Adobe Reader plug-in) to fill them in.
Unfortunately, I cannot do that using OOo alone: filled-in PDF forms created by OOo cannot be saved or emailed. (The filled-in data can be dealt with in other ways, not appropriate for this situation.) I did find an easy way to do it, using Adobe Acrobat Standard or Adobe Acrobat Pro. Although I dislike the necessity to use Acrobat, I am doing so for this project. Here is the method I used:
- Create the form in OOo Writer. (Refer to Chapter 15, Using Forms, in the Writer Guide.) See Tip below for an easy way to create space for someone to type in answers.
- Export the file to PDF. On the General tab of the PDF Options dialog, be sure to select the option for Create PDF form and set the Submit format to PDF.
- Open the PDF in Adobe Acrobat. Choose Forms > Run Form Field Recognition from the menu bar. If you had text fields in the form, the left-hand section of the results should be a Recognition Report. Scroll to the bottom of this section and click on To fix this text field…. (Picture below shows what it looked like after clicking on that link.) This enables typing in the spaces created using the tip at the end of this post.
- Save the file under another name if you wish.
- Choose Advanced > Enable Usage Rights in Adobe Reader from the menu bar. This is necessary for people to be able to save and email the PDF with the filled-in data.
- Save the file.
Tip: If you want to have a space for someone to type in a short answer, you don’t need to create a text box form control. I used the underscore key (Shift+hyphen) to create an underscored space of appropriate length, which Acrobat converted into a type-in field. This also worked when I defined a right-aligned tab with the underscore as the fill-in character. Saved a lot of typing; once the tab was defined, all I needed to do was press the Tab key once to get a whole line of underscores.
However, if you want a multiple-line area for lengthy typing and text wrap at the end of lines, you will need to use a text box form control.
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Thank you very much for this post. Is there a way to do this without Adobe Acrobat? I.e. on Linux with open source software?
Thanks
Aldi
I am also a Linux user, and I prefer to use open source software whenever possible, but I have not found a way to do this without Acrobat, especially the step that makes the fill-in form able to be saved. If someone can tell me about other software that will do this, I would very much appreciate it. –Jean
You can create PDF forms for free (on any operating system with a browser) at http://www.pdfescape.com
Should meet your PDF form creation needs most of the time.
I’ve got access to a copy of Acrobat Standard 8. I’m not seeing the options “Run form field recognition” or “Enable usage rights in Adobe Reader”. Should I assume that version 8 is too old to have these features or is there perhaps a configuration issue that’s preventing me from seeing them?
I think those functions may be only in the Pro version, not Standard. I have Acrobat 8 Pro.
Unfortunately, tried to create PDF forms from OpenOffice which could be filled AND saved modified from Adobe Acrobat Reader, and after much investigation and some frustration, I had to surrender. I even opened a bug to OpenOffice issue tracker, and the response I got from the developers was quite disappointing. See the gory details at http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=73696
To make a long story short, it seems the ability for Reader to be able to save modified PDF forms (whatever program they are created with) depends on some obscure, undocumented, non-standard PDF format flags or the like, which only Adobe seems to know, and without their presence on the PDF file Reader simply rejects to save forms with fields filled in. From the link above one can think that the changes needed for OpenOffice to be able to create modifiable PDF forms were not that complex, and the outcome could be a great boost to PDF form usage and creation with only free software. Sad enough, the developers didn’t think so, and closed the issue as a WONTFIX.
If samba developers had opted for the same way of reasoning, at the first sign of a non well documented or not fully standard issue, samba implementation would have come to a stop. We all agree obscure vendor modifications of standards are evil, and shouldn’t exist, but a somewhat easy to do change could have enabled us to be free of an expensive and completely closed source program from Adobe. But now, anyone wanting to create fillable forms that can be saved modified have to spend big bucks and resort to closed source. That completely prevents wide adoption of PDF fillable forms in the open source world, except on those places where filled fields are directly sent to the Internet from inside the document.
I think I will never regret enough of not having time and knowledge to have been able to implement this feature. Oh, and being able to make it land the OpenOffice codebase, that seems to be another difficult thing to achieve.
Rant ended, excuse me, but I spent dozens of hours with this issue time ago, and it seems three years later nothing changed for the better. It’s frustrating
Medellin, may 11
You can fill & save forms craeted with OOo and saved as Pdf files, using FoxIt (http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/reader/) .
Best regards
Levarcol
That program is Windows only. No use to me, nor to many of the people I work with.
I have the same issue, most of users have acrobat reader, and they cannot save modified forms.
Tried many others tools: no way to get out.
Has anyone a solution?