Creating cross-platform fillable PDF Form

April 22, 2015 8:25 AM

For work I need to make some interactive PDF forms that users can fill out and download/print, to then upload to another site.

I've made some in the past, but I've heard of issues with them from different users in that they don't work for everyone. I created them with Acrobat Pro on a PC, but users on Macs often tried to fill them out with Mac Preview and had problems. What can I do to create forms that anyone can fill out without problems? Thanks!

posted by chirico to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Acrobat forms are a royal pain. Adobe have two ways of implementing them: the older AcroForm method, and the newer, more flexible XFA approach. Unfortunately, XFA doesn't work very well over different platforms, and isn't always compatible across Adobe products. Documents produced on LiveCycle Designer have features you can't properly edit in Acrobat Pro.

Apple Preview will not always save form data reliably. I haven't found a pattern to this yet. This script may help, or at least provide an explanation of what's going on.

Do your forms need to do anything more clever than an analogue of paper? If not, use the lowest version of the PDF standard you can, and make sure that Acrobat isn't adding XFA data. You can strip off XFA data with PDFtk.
posted by scruss at 10:58 AM on April 22, 2015 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: Thanks for the reply. The forms are pretty basic- fill in name, numbers, etc. No dropdowns, but maybe some checkboxes, radio buttons. But I'm not performing any logic/processing on those or any fields.
posted by chirico at 12:23 PM on April 22, 2015

Jotform and Wufoo (both pay services)
posted by puckish at 7:52 PM on April 22, 2015 [1 favorite]

Does Wufoo solve the Apple Preview AcroForm issue, puckish? If so, I'm impressed!
posted by scruss at 1:41 PM on April 23, 2015