Sometimes I get some PDF forms to fill in and send back by email.
To do this, one have to:
- print the PDF
- fill or sign in certain places and then …
- scan the document.
There are some drawbacks to this method:
- you need money for printer ink
- you need time for doing all these steps
- you must have a scanner or at least decent camera
- after rasterizing the PDF to JPG/PNG it won’t print again as pretty as it used to
I’ve been searching some online services with PDF editing, but there are no such things … at least I didn’t find it. There exists commercial PDF viewers which allows you to add text/ink to PDF documents, but they work either only on Mac or Windows, they are not online and they cost moneeeyyy
So here it is – free thing which allows you to fill out pdf (you will need a tablet though, it would be hard to do it using a mouse)
It uses a huge but awesome javascript library for displaying pdf’s – PDF.JS (really, tremendous work by these guys to show PDF document on a canvas element) and makes use of the File API, so it won’t work on older browsers. But it is a known story concerning HTML5 thats why I’m not a big fan of it ; )
There are also other things that may not work:
- PDF.JS may have problems with opacity or displaying some PDF’s
- Encrypted PDF’s may not work
- Some other PDF’s may not work, because I didn’t test hundreds but only several tens of PDF’s
- THERE’S NO ERASER TOOL
Apart from that, I have used it for several documents with success. If your PDF don’t work, most possible cause is, that it is inconsistent according to PDF spec and you should print it again to PDF.
I had problems with newest Microsoft Word PDF Plugin, PDF’s there lacks of xref table and the references are all wrong.