The Canadian government provides a number of fillable forms in pdf format, but while you can print the filled out form, you cannot save it to a file. So I googled “save pdf files” and found several claiming to be free pdf, but I just don’t trust freeware. Can anyone recommend a safe download? I am not really interested in creating pdf files, only saving to disk what I can already print.
I for one recommend PDFCreator.
I also use and love PDFCreator, but I don’t think it’s really what the OP is looking for. Using PDFCreator to save the PDF file will create a .pdf file that will look similar, but will not have the form features of the original. What the OP needs is to be able to unlock the original pdf file so that a copy can be saved. I’m not aware of an easy way to do that.
Perhaps I misunderstood and the OP simply wants an electronic print of the filled out form. In that case, PDFCreator will work admirably.
flex is right. What I want to be able to do is reedit if necessary, changing some of the filled in parts. This makes me think that this might be a built-in limitation to Illustrator, rather than something imposed by the government for some unfathomable reason.
Maybe I will get a copy of PDFCreator anyway, on general principals. Thanks for the answers.
I’m a bit confused by your mention of Illustrator, but then I am completely ignorant of that particular software. I have to assume (but perhaps I shouldn’t) that you have simply opened the pdf in Adobe Reader and tried to click the “Save” icon.
Can you point me to one of them? I wonder whether you need the full version of Acrobat to save and reload them? Making them unsaveable but printable strikes me as odd; were they intended to be used in a browser window?
If Acrobat still works the way it did when I last experienced this, the answer is “You can’t.”
Acrobat’s Form feature is meant to be used in concert with a central database and the values the end user enters via Acrobat Reader are simply supposed to be submitted back to the database.
Another happy PDFCreator user here.
It might not be what you are looking for right now, but it will definitely come in handy many times in the future.
It’s just like Acrobat Distiller, without the overhead and licensing of Acrobat.
It also allows you to spool several print jobs and then send them to a single file if you want.
So, what happens, you click on a PDF link and your browser opens a PDF directly? And when you select File–>Save As, you don’t get the option to save the PDF?
Have you triied right-clicking on the link to the PDF and selecting Save Link As…?
You could also try using Cntl-A, which selects all the text, then Cntl-C, which copies it, then opening a new document in Wordpad or MS Word, then doing a paste with Cntl-V. You’ll lose all the formatting, but at least you’ll have the text. That won’t work if they scanned the docs instead of saved as PDF, but such cases are rare.
If none of that works, post one of the URLs here and I’ll see what I can do. I’ve had to reverse engineer a lot of PDFs in my day.
A couple of months ago, I renewed my passport using the online form on the US Dept of State website. The result was a PDF document including all of my responses that I was able to save on my computer. (I’m not sure whether I can change the responses subsequently, though.) Another nice thing about the form is that it converted all of my responses to a two-dimensional barcode on the paper. Presumably this allowed the passport office to scan the application and quickly get the data into their computer.
What happens when you attempt to save a filled-in form created by Acrobat depends on the usage rights defined by the author. Some will allow you to print but not save; some will permit you to save as a PDF, but that version will not be a form any more, and you can’t make any changes (IRS forms are like this). If all you have is Acrobat Reader, this is as far as you can go anyway. If the rights are unrestricted, AND you have the right version of Acrobat (and LifeCycle Designer, IIRC), you may be able to save the document as a new form. If you are using third-party software, you may be able to do this as well, but I have no idea how well that works – it’s hard to tell exactly what some of these companies are claiming, much less whether they can do it.
The forms were intended to be filled out, printed, and then mailed to the appropriate government agency. The save button saves only the original unfilled form. When I realized that there was an error on the printed form, the only thing I could do was reload the form and fill it out again, including all the boilerplate (name, address, birthdate, etc.). Leading to a new error and so on.
What I should have done was to print it, leaving the original fill-in form loaded, so I could edit that. Still it is a nuisance.