I have looked across the vast expanse of the web, downloaded megabytes of software, tried some online converters, and found everything lacking or annoying, so I’ll ask the crowd here…
Does anyone here know of good software, that can take a plain (not E-form) pdf, with random line spacing (and indeed, lines), and allow me to fill it out without jumping through hoops and swearing a lot? (Windows OS)
The best option I came up with, was just to paste the bloody thing into Word as an image, and then coerce, pound, and finesse the line spacing until I could type in the information and have it readable.
This isn’t urgent, as this is only about the second time I’ve come up with this problem, but I would like to know if anybody has a better solution.
PDF-XChange Viewer. Use the typewriter tool. It’s free. Make it your default PDF viewer too and you may also avoid some of the malware designed to exploit Adobe Acrobat.
I haven’t tried that one so hopefully you like it.
If not, I’ve had moderate success with PDFill Form Filler:
It’s really annoying and slow, but it works.
I eventually switched to regular ol’ Acrobat, which actually works really, really well. Its form auto-generation will scan a document for lines and what it thinks are form fields and automatically turn it into them for you. It’s worked on about 70% of the things I’ve tried it with, and I liked it enough to uninstall all the other alternative PDF readers and editors I’ve used over the years.
There is, however, a lot of malware associated with it (as njtt points out) so using it is always a risk.
And, of course, it’s very expensive. I got it as a student version. The regular product is ridiculously unaffordable.