Thursday, May 04, 2006

Making Acrobat Reader 7 save fillable PDFs

I have a flexible spending account with an accounting firm that uses PDF forms. They aren't fillable. At work, I have a license for Acrobat Professional, so it's not rocket science to put form fields on it (and in particular, script them to tote up the receipts I'm filing). This morning, my printer ink carts went belly-up and I couldn't print the form I intended to sign, scan and fax to the accounting firm.

Bummer. See, at home, I don't have a license for Acrobat Pro, so the best I can do is fill out the form in Acrobat Reader (because in Tiger, Preview ignores the calculation scripts and worse, scales the field font size too large to fit them) -- but AR won't let you save the file, and it's just bright enough to prevent you from printing to PDF (which, IMO, is criminal misconduct).

There are two solutions to this problem depending on your platform.

OS X: AR 7 isn't bright enough to prevent you from printing to PostScript proper, which Preview is perfectly capable of reading, converting back to PDF and saving back to that format.

Windows: If you don't have PDFcreator installed as a printer driver on your box, shame on you. If you have CutePDF, double shame: you're using a crippled version meant to sell you a "complete" PDF printer driver which has nearly nothing that PDFcreator doesn't already have. AR 7 on Windows is not smart enough to recognize one printer driver from another, and will be happy to let you print your PDF to another PDF.

Linux: Most KDE distros have a PDF printer driver already configured. Follow above instructions.

Now, I have a filled PDF I can keep in my records, bring to work, print and sign.

Dear Adobe: you created fillable forms and hard-sold them on us. Quit pretending the most basic utility (saving them) is a premium feature and we won't have to own your sorry asses like this.