[Aleko]

Hi everybody.
I have one simple question. What software do i need to edit PDF file?
I downloaded application form from internet which is in PDF format an i want to fill it out in the same format enstead of printing it out and filling it out by hand.

Thanks

[albook]

Adobe Acrobat

[Big Mac]

I tried to get the Adobe plugin but was unable to install it (probably chose not to during installation of Reader) and could not find it separately. Instead, I finally got the excellent PDF Browser Plugin.

[tooki]

The browser plugin is read-only.

Only Adobe Reader supports filling out PDF forms -- if they've been designed to allow this. It is not really possible to "edit" a PDF without a lot of effort.

tooki

[TheIceMan]

Try PDFpen - it's $50

[CharlesS]

Uh, guys... Preview can fill out PDF forms in Tiger. For free. So can Safari (as long as you're using the built-in PDF functionality and not one of the third-party browser plug-ins).

[tooki]

It can? That's new.

That said, Adobe Reader is free, too...

tooki

[CharlesS]

Originally Posted by tooki

It can? That's new.

Not really. Tiger was released about 6 months ago.

That said, Adobe Reader is free, too...

Adobe Reader is also crap. It's a pain in the neck to obtain, and when you finally do get it, it installs that crappy Adobe browser plugin, which when I tried it, caused Safari to crash reproducibly until I removed it.

The only time I'd resort to using Adobe Reader would be if a PDF form did something fancy that Preview didn't know how to handle. Why bother with Reader when Preview is already on your hard drive and will probably do the job just fine?

[mpancha]

it can? Just tried it, and it worked. I didn't know Preview could already do that either.

I also tried out PDF Browser Plugin, it did let me view in Safari, which is somethign I wanted to be able to do, but when I try to type in a form it crashes Safari.

But now that I know preview will do the filling in for me, even better.

[CharlesS]

Originally Posted by mpancha

I also tried out PDF Browser Plugin, it did let me view in Safari, which is somethign I wanted to be able to do, but when I try to type in a form it crashes Safari.

If you're on Tiger, you don't need PDF Browser Plugin. Safari will view PDFs natively, without any plug-ins, and it will let you fill them out as well.

Plus, the built-in Safari PDF functionality works with your mouse's scroll wheel, and it lets you use Command-F to search for text within the PDF file.

[wataru]

Adobe Reader may be crap, but I have come across PDFs in the past that would not work in Preview (it thought they were locked or encrypted or something) and only worked in Adobe Reader. That may have been pre-Tiger, but I still make sure I keep a copy of Reader around just to be sure.

[selowitch]

What about Adobe LiveCycle Developer?

Unfortunately, it only comes with the Windows version of Acrobat Professional.

I wonder if there's a similar tool for the Mac? ALCD is great for creating forms that contain business logic. I wowed my boss with it so completely he offered me a raise on the spot!

[ghporter]

Unless a PDF form is built to be filled out, it CANNOT be filled out by anything. A non-fillable PDF form is basically just a graphic; it lacks the fields and database structure needed to make it fillable by any software.

I had a similar issue a few months ago and used an old version of Acrobat to make the "print it and fill it out by hand" form into a fillable form. It was a turbo-atomic royal pain in my butt to do this. At the time it seemed worthwhile, but looking back, it probably wasn't.

[selowitch]

Originally Posted by ghporter

Unless a PDF form is built to be filled out, it CANNOT be filled out by anything. A non-fillable PDF form is basically just a graphic; it lacks the fields and database structure needed to make it fillable by any software.

Exactly. I want to make a fill-in order form that will automatically total up everything, compute shipping, tax, and total, then print nicely for faxing in. We don't do true e-commerce (Boss won't allow it, which is a not a good decision), but that's the next-best-thing IMO.

[ghporter]

Originally Posted by selowitch

Exactly. I want to make a fill-in order form that will automatically total up everything, compute shipping, tax, and total, then print nicely for faxing in. We don't do true e-commerce (Boss won't allow it, which is a not a good decision), but that's the next-best-thing IMO.

Then you need Acrobat. I'm using (when I do use it) version 5 and it's fine. Around here Half Price Books often has some very interesting software for not too much money, and that's where I found my copy of Acrobat. Poke around and you may find it for a very reasonable price.

[selowitch]

Originally Posted by ghporter

Then you need Acrobat. I'm using (when I do use it) version 5 and it's fine. Around here Half Price Books often has some very interesting software for not too much money, and that's where I found my copy of Acrobat. Poke around and you may find it for a very reasonable price.

Well, if I want to use Acrobat Designer, I have to have Acrobat version 7 AFAIK. Most unfortunately, Designer doesn't exist in the Mac version.

I've been playing around with Acrobat Designer at work and it's great for making order forms with "business logic" (i.e., calculations for taxes, shipping, et al.). Too bad there's no Mac version. Anybody know of an alternative?

[mpancha]

Originally Posted by CharlesS

If you're on Tiger, you don't need PDF Browser Plugin. Safari will view PDFs natively, without any plug-ins, and it will let you fill them out as well.

Plus, the built-in Safari PDF functionality works with your mouse's scroll wheel, and it lets you use Command-F to search for text within the PDF file.

Didn't know that either. The last time I tried was when I was on 10.4.0, and it didn't do it for me.

[Athens]

Originally Posted by wataru

Adobe Reader may be crap, but I have come across PDFs in the past that would not work in Preview (it thought they were locked or encrypted or something) and only worked in Adobe Reader. That may have been pre-Tiger, but I still make sure I keep a copy of Reader around just to be sure.

I havent had any problems with Tiger's preview reading locked/encrypted pdf files. U can also use Preview to take a unlocked pdf file and resave it as a encrypted/locked file

[wataru]

The problem was that the PDF actually wasn't locked or encrypted, but Preview thought it was.

[ghporter]

Originally Posted by selowitch

Well, if I want to use Acrobat Designer, I have to have Acrobat version 7 AFAIK. Most unfortunately, Designer doesn't exist in the Mac version.

I've been playing around with Acrobat Designer at work and it's great for making order forms with "business logic" (i.e., calculations for taxes, shipping, et al.). Too bad there's no Mac version. Anybody know of an alternative?

Acrobat Pro allows you to make forms all by itself-you don't need Designer. And I have opened existing PDF (non-fillable) forms in Acrobat 5, added form fields to them, and saved them successfully. It's not really that hard at all.

[tooki]

Originally Posted by CharlesS

Not really. Tiger was released about 6 months ago.


Adobe Reader is also crap. It's a pain in the neck to obtain, and when you finally do get it, it installs that crappy Adobe browser plugin, which when I tried it, caused Safari to crash reproducibly until I removed it.

The only time I'd resort to using Adobe Reader would be if a PDF form did something fancy that Preview didn't know how to handle. Why bother with Reader when Preview is already on your hard drive and will probably do the job just fine?

Wow, you have a LOT of pent-up anger over Adobe Reader!

Forgive me for not noticing one feature (one that one seldom ever encounters and is invisible until used) in a program that lacked that feature in the prior 4 versions.

Anyhow, how is Adobe Reader "a pain in the neck to obtain"?!? You download it, double-click, and let it do its thing. As of version 7, I've found the Adobe Reader plugin to be fast, stable, and -- because it's rendering using the Adobe PDF engine -- to render PDFs more reliably. It also has a FAR more functional zoom.

Remember not to let memories of Acrobat Reader 6 cloud your judgement -- version 6 was a horrible monstrosity. Version 7 renders just as fast as Preview, and is far more full-featured.

Originally Posted by CharlesS

If you're on Tiger, you don't need PDF Browser Plugin. Safari will view PDFs natively, without any plug-ins, and it will let you fill them out as well.

Plus, the built-in Safari PDF functionality works with your mouse's scroll wheel, and it lets you use Command-F to search for text within the PDF file.

You say that as if the Adobe Reader plugin lacks those features. I just tested it to make sure I wasn't imagining things, and it does both those things.

tooki

[CharlesS]

Originally Posted by mpancha

Didn't know that either. The last time I tried was when I was on 10.4.0, and it didn't do it for me.

I'm pretty sure it worked in 10.4.0. I used Tiger's PDF features as a selling point to get my dad to upgrade from OS 9. I dunno, maybe my memory is wrong, but I think I switched him either in the 10.4.0 or 10.4.1 days. And I thought I remembered seeing the info on the new PDF features in one of those special reports on AppleInsider when Tiger was still in beta.

Are you sure that the PDF you tried when under 10.4.0 was actually a fillable form?

Originally Posted by ghporter

Acrobat Pro allows you to make forms all by itself-you don't need Designer. And I have opened existing PDF (non-fillable) forms in Acrobat 5, added form fields to them, and saved them successfully. It's not really that hard at all.

Wait, first it's a turbo-atomic royal pain in the butt, then it's not really that hard?

[CharlesS]

Originally Posted by tooki

Wow, you have a LOT of pent-up anger over Adobe Reader!

The stupid program has given me so much aggravation over the years that I'll never touch it unless some PDF file absolutely won't open with Preview.

Anyhow, how is Adobe Reader "a pain in the neck to obtain"?!? You download it, double-click, and let it do its thing.

Are you sure you've really installed Adobe Reader? Because this is the actual process that I had to go through.

1. You go to Adobe's site and download a .pkg installer.

2. You run the .pkg installer.

3. You go to the Applications folder and wonder why Adobe Reader isn't in there. That's because what you installed from the .pkg package wasn't Adobe Reader itself, but rather an application called "Adobe Download Manager" that's in the Utilities folder. That's right, folks, you just downloaded an installer to install... the installer!*

4. Find Adobe Download Manager in the Utilities folder and run it.

5. Wait for Adobe Download Manager to download Adobe Reader.**

6. Now here's the best part - what it just downloaded, was the Adobe Reader INSTALLER! So now you get to run the installer AGAIN! Oh boy!

So basically the initial download was the installer of the installer of the installer. Great!

7. Now, notice how the installer put the Adobe PDF plug-in in your Internet Plug-Ins folder without your permission or knowledge. If you like Safari's built-in PDF features and don't want that, now you have to go root it out yourself.

8. Now you get to answer a bunch of annoying dialogs when you launch Adobe Reader. Yes, I know Reader isn't the default PDF viewer. No, I don't want to "repair" this "problem." Yes, I know that the browser plug-in isn't there. No, I don't want to "repair" this either.

Sure, this 8-step process may not seem that difficult to you or me. But after walking my easily frustrated father who's in his 50s through this procedure, which took somewhere from 30 minutes to an hour and involved getting yelled at by him quite a bit, I know this is not universal.

Basically, I don't understand why the .pkg you download from the Adobe site can't, you know, just install the damn Reader app and be done with it?

*Okay, in 7.0.5 they've renamed "Adobe Download Manager" to "Adobe Reader Download Manager" and the .pkg now seems to auto-run it after the install (of the installer of the installer). All I know is that this was not case with whichever version of Reader 7 my dad was trying to install, and walking him through finding the damn Adobe Download Manager involved a good bit of getting cussed out because he had trouble understanding my instructions to look in the Utilities folder instead of just the Applications folder.

**When I tried this with 7.0.5, I got a "The download was corrupt." error at this point and had to start over again. So lose a step, gain a step.

As of version 7, I've found the Adobe Reader plugin to be fast, stable, and -- because it's rendering using the Adobe PDF engine -- to render PDFs more reliably. It also has a FAR more functional zoom.

Well, at least version 7.0.5 seems to have fixed the problem that used to reproducibly make Safari crash every time I clicked on a PDF link. However, I've found it to be not anywhere near as fast. In particular, the damn thing causes Safari to beachball every time I click on a link to a sufficiently large PDF file. This means that I can't do any browsing in another window while I'm waiting for a large PDF file to load! And this is on a 2.0 GHz G5 iMac with 1.5 GB of RAM, which is a more powerful machine than what a lot of people have.

It also doesn't look as good as the default Apple text anti-aliasing, and doesn't offer a way to open the PDF file with Preview (or even, as far as I can tell, Adobe Reader!) without saving the file to the Desktop and then double-clicking on it. Oh, of course you could go to Print and then click Preview, except that you can't - you get a "Preview is not supported" error message! Did they specifically override the Apple print panel's features to keep me from being able to use Preview to view the damn file?!

Remember not to let memories of Acrobat Reader 6 cloud your judgement -- version 6 was a horrible monstrosity. Version 7 renders just as fast as Preview, and is far more full-featured.

No, I've had version 7 on my machine since it came out. I tried the browser plugin because, at the time, Panther was the latest version of OS X and Safari didn't have PDF support built-in, but ended up ditching it for the Schubert plug-in because of the problems mentioned above. However, Adobe Reader sucks, even in version 7. Here are some issues with version 7:

1. The installation procedure is a PITA.

2. The font rendering doesn't look as good as Apple's.

3. Although they've fixed the reproducible crashing problem with Safari in 7.0.5, that problem definitely existed in an earlier build of version 7.

4. The bloody app insists on making the window fill the entire screen when you open a PDF file, even on my 20" iMac, and even when the actual document that's being displayed is about half the width of the actual window, and the rest is unused grey space!

5. Here's the aggravating thing that used to drive me nuts back in the Jaguar days when I had to use Adobe Reader 5 because Preview didn't have a search feature at the time, and which (guess what!) is still present in Adobe Reader 7: the search feature. What's so irritating about Reader's search feature?

a. It takes bloody forever. Try this little test once:

i. Open the PDF version of Apple's AppKit developer docs for Cocoa in Adobe Reader 7.

ii. In Reader 7, type Command-F and search for something that appears near the end of the document, like "NSShowControlGlyphs."

iii. Wait.

iv. Wait.

v. Wait some more.

vi. When the search eventually gets to page 200 or so (out of 1838!), open the same PDF file with Preview and do the same search.

vii. When Preview finishes finding every occurrence of NSShowControlGlyphs, switch back to Reader and see how far it's got (mine got to page 261, meaning that even counting the extra steps of launching Preview, opening the PDF, and typing my search parameter, Preview searched 1838 pages in the same time that Reader got through 61).

b. Okay, we've established that Reader's search is slow as molasses. In Reader 5, the app used to be non-multithreaded and would lock up the whole program until the search was done, causing me to browse MacNN while waiting for the search to complete, all the while thinking about how marvelous OS X's then-new multitasking features were (speaking of which, why is Reader 7 just as slow now on my G5 as Reader 5 was on my old G4/450? Oh well). Well, Reader 7 is surely better in this regard, right? I mean, now it's multithreaded, and I can read another PDF file (say, the Foundation docs) while it's searching! Right? Well, try clicking another PDF to the front while a PDF is searching, and guess what happens? The search starts over! Except now it's searching the Foundation PDF! Switch back to the AppKit PDF and it starts over again, searching that PDF file from page 1! So all that time you waited for your search just went down the drain! Argh!!

c. Okay, screw this, I'm going to go look the thing up by hand. Of course, the Find panel is in the way, since it opens up on top of your document instead of above the bookmarks bar which is always present anyway. Who would have thought of something as nifty as that? Besides the Preview programmers, I mean. So all I have to do is Command-W to close the Find window, right? No, because Command-W just closed the entire document, behind the Find window! Argh!!! WHY HAVE THEY STILL NOT FIXED THIS, TWO VERSION NUMBERS LATER?!! So now I've gotta open the file back up. Of course, it won't snap open to the page it was on, like Preview does, so I'll have to get back to my previous position manually. And next time, I've gotta remember that the only way to close the Find panel is with the mouse, for some reason.

Sorry, Adobe Reader sucks. Freaking Internet Explorer is a better program. By leaps and bounds. Hell, if someone made a hack to get Calculator to open PDF files, it would probably be a more pleasant experience than using Adobe Reader.

You say that as if the Adobe Reader plugin lacks those features. I just tested it to make sure I wasn't imagining things, and it does both those things.

No, if you actually read my post, you'd realize that I said that as if PDF Browser Plugin lacked those features. And it does. But at least it lets you open the PDF file with Preview if you want to. Adobe Reader 7.0.5's plugin lets you search with Command-F now. Good for it. In earlier versions of Reader 7, I remember having to click on their toolbar icon. Or maybe it was Reader 6. I don't remember.

Ah, that felt good. I needed to vent a little after a long day.

[ghporter]

Originally Posted by CharlesS

Wait, first it's a turbo-atomic royal pain in the butt, then it's not really that hard?

Let me explain. It was a pain because 1) the form was created by someone with "stylistic and layout disabilities" including a complete lack of appreciation for anything resembling design consistency, 2) because I had to install all of Adobe 5 (yes, I'm talking about 5-and for Windows too!) just to do this one form, and 3) I didn't bother to read the help files (very helpful indeed) or instructions before I wandered my way into unknown territory and hosed my first three attempts.

Once it was installed, once I got over the fact that in one place on the form an address could be enormous, and elsewhere the same address information was needed in a slightly different format but with only a tiny space, once I got over the FIVE differend date formats required on the form, and once I bothered to read the instructions, it was as easy as "draw the box, name it, give it a data type, move on to the next one." Of course the boxes were supposed to fit into the form's boxes, and they weren't a consistent size either...

I understand the apparent conflict and I sure did make it sound like a huge one. But the pain was because of the form and my hardheadedness, not because of Acrobat.