Type on top of a PDF with Typewriter Tool

November 17, 2006 9:14 PM

Acrobat Pro Typewriter Tool question - it's greyed out!

I'm trying to fill in a pdf that hasn't incorporated fields, and heard that I can use Acrobat Pro's typewriter tool to add text on top of a document. I have Acrobat Pro 7.0.8 for Mac OS X, but for some reason the tool and all of its subtools are greyed out. One other symptom: the snapshot tool is also unavailable...

What do I need to do to access the typewriter tool on this document? I didn't have to enter a password to open it, it's not locked or write-only in the Finder, so it seems to have no access restrictions.

Any help is greatly appreciated - my handwriting is terrible, so it would be great if I could do it this way.

posted by stewiethegreat to computers & internet (6 comments total)

You can do this in a number of ways. The way I like doing it is to insert form fields. For Windows machines (probably very similar to OSX) the steps are:

Tools -> Advanced Editing -> Forms -> Text Field Tool

Make a box to hold the text and format it however you like. Do this for all the fields. Then save the PDF and you should have a nice, fill-in-able form.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 7:19 AM on November 18, 2006

Hmm... It's not letting me do that. Any idea why most of my advanced editing tools are greyed out too?
posted by stewiethegreat at 7:57 PM on November 18, 2006

Ok, try this: first extract the pages into a new working document. A lot of times people put restrictions on their PDFs that prevent you from doing exactly this sort of thing to them (Document -> Pages -> Extract)
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 8:21 PM on November 18, 2006

Just discovered in document properties that it actually is password protected... Which is why I can't do anything with it, including the Pages>Extract thing. I'll try turning it in to a series of images, or some other such low-tech workaround.

Thanks.
posted by stewiethegreat at 8:43 PM on November 18, 2006

I can, well, crack the PDF password for you if you'd like. If it's sensitive material, don't sweat it. Email's in the profile.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 10:44 PM on November 18, 2006

I found a way to remove the password - but I suspect that there are Apple employees who read MeFi, so I won't post the directions here...

Thanks for the offer. :)
posted by stewiethegreat at 8:46 AM on November 19, 2006