New answers tagged forms
1
Might be a bit late to this one but having experienced this myself I would genuinely just start moving to Web Forms for this. Others have listed out the major reasons above but to be honest, my opinion on situations like these is:
If there are 2 perfectly usable options where one is open-source and the other is proprietary (e.g. HTML Vs PDF) then go with ...
2
Even if you force users to download a PDF instead of opening it directly, you have no control over what program they use to open it (for security reasons).
Others have mentioned DocuSign (or similar), which have great tooling for not only signing but access control and 3rd-party verification. For most people, this is a good way to go. However the pricing ...
1
I worked on a project many years ago which used downloadable Word documents with form fields and editing protection which disallowed changing anything except the contents of the form fields. If your users will have Word (or maybe LibreOffice – you could do tests to see what the compatibility is like nowadays) then this might be an alternative. I've not ...
0
Are you able to modify the files at all?
There are some systems that (ab)use the fact that every pdf reader renders differently to detect what PDF reader you are using.
I know I have seen PDFs created before, which if not opened in adobe reader, only display a page asking the user to download the correct software.
Google's currently failing me, but I ...
5
There is no standard practise. You'll have to re-think your process:
Why do your customers have to fill out PDFs in the first place?
Do you just need structured data from the customer? Who needs the PDF later, a government agency? Do you have to provide the customer with the same PDF? Can your company create web forms instead of PDFs? Can you auto-generate ...
10
You could try to force downloading of the PDF, so that it opens in the default application for viewing PDF files instead of the browser.
See this question: How do I force files to open in the browser instead of downloading (PDF)?
18
Normally, I recommend replacing fillable PDFs with regular web forms
I think overall, yes, that would be the ideal solution, but you noted some of the the issues with this, which includes how to handle all the existing content already made.
We run into issues constantly because web browsers love to open PDFs in browser instead of opening the files in the ...
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