Fill PDF Form

What the tool reads and fills

• Every interactive field in the PDF is listed on screen, grouped by the page it appears on, in a plain web form you can tab through.
• Text boxes, including multi-line ones and fields with a character limit. The limit is enforced while you type, so an answer never overruns a box like a ZIP code or a date.
• Checkboxes, radio button groups, dropdowns (including ones that allow your own entry) and option lists that allow one or several choices.
• Labels come from the field's own tooltip text where the form author provided one, and otherwise from the field's name, tidied up for reading.
• Answers already in the form are shown so you can change them, and read-only fields are shown but cannot be edited.
• Signature fields and buttons are not listed, because there is nothing to type into them. Add a signature afterwards with Sign PDF.

Why answers sometimes vanish, and how this avoids it

A field holds two things: the answer itself, and the picture of the answer that a reader draws on the page. Some apps update only one of them, so the answers exist but nobody sees them, or they show on your screen and nowhere else.

• After filling, the tool redraws the appearance of every field, so the answers display the same way in every PDF reader, including ones that never redraw fields themselves.
• Some government and corporate forms also contain an Adobe XFA form alongside the standard fields. Readers that understand XFA show that version and ignore what was filled in elsewhere. The XFA part is removed so every reader shows your answers, and the tool tells you when it has done so.
• The flag that makes readers redraw the form on opening is cleared, so the recipient does not get a prompt to save changes when they close a form they did not edit.
• Locking the answers flattens the form: each answer becomes ordinary page content and the fields are removed, so nothing can be changed later. Proofread first, because flattening cannot be undone.
• Leave the answers unlocked if the recipient needs to correct or add to them, or if the form will be submitted to a system that reads the field values.

Limits worth knowing

• Only interactive forms have fields. A scanned form, or one exported from a word processor, is a picture of a form with nothing to fill, and the tool will say so. Type your answers onto the page with Edit PDF instead.
• Answers are drawn in Helvetica, one of the fonts built into every PDF reader. It covers English and Western European languages; characters outside it, such as Greek, Cyrillic or Polish letters, are replaced with a question mark, and the tool tells you how many.
• Calculated fields, such as a total that adds up other boxes, keep whatever value they held. Their scripts are not run, so check totals yourself.
• Pure XFA forms, which have no standard fields at all, cannot be filled here. These are rare outside a few Adobe-built government forms.
• A password-protected form needs the password removed first.
• Everything happens in your browser. Tax, medical and immigration forms carry exactly the details you would not want passing through someone else's server.