I am trying to fill out a PDF form for the government, but it will not let me save the information to disc. I assume this is to get me to buy a more expensive adobe product. Is there an free program out there that will let me fill out a pdf form and save it?
I discovered this long ago. If it’s on your screen, you own it.
Get the free program called CutePDF and follow their directions. You also download a post script virtual printer to your system. All you do is “Print to File” using CutePDF and then it saves that document. You can print as many copies as wanted. However, you cannot edit it further.
Seconding CutePDF - you can turn pretty much anything printable into a PDF using this program.
I believe the inability to save a filled-in form is a configuration setting in the document set by the person who created the form, rather than an intrinsic product limitation. (I have Acrobat Pro 6.0 although wasn’t able to find this in a quick read of Help and didn’t have time for a more thorough search.) ETA: You might also try an alternative to Acrobat Reader such as Foxit.
More precisely, the inability to save a filled-in form is a type of defect, known as “digital restrictions management” or DRM, intentionally built into many PDF viewers. For some PDF documents, these viewers may also refuse to allow you to select and copy text to the clipboard, to print the document, or to use the “read aloud” function of your screen reader.
There are many PDF viewers out there which are not defective by design, so it is best to use one of those instead.
While I agree with everyone above in this specific case, for general form filling out, I recommend PDF-XChange Viewer. This way you don’t even have to have a PDF that actually has real forms. You can just use the typewriter and write on top of it the same way as if you printed it out.
I think you are lucky that your PDF is an actual form and not just a document that looks like a form. Those are rare.
I’ve had both forms that you could save, with data and forms that you could not save the data from and even non-fillable forms.
It all comes down to the document creator and their knowledge of Adobe. I know that because I actually spoke with one of the document creators for one form, when I explained how to make it savable, the next version of the form was savable.