Forms in Acrobat

[Alexis]

I have a document which has a number of forms embedded throughout. Once it's saved through Acrobat, you can open it up with Adobe Reader and type into the form boxes.

But then you can't obviously save the file with Reader.

Is there are a free program out there (apart from Acrobat 30 day trial) which can enable people to save the PDF, containing all the text they've typed into the forms?

I'm confused about the whole purpose of forms to be honest as well. What's the point of having the facility if the only people who can make use of it are the people using the same piece of expensive software as you?

 

[technologist]

Acrobat is meant to reproduce paper forms.

The idea is, they fill out the form, print it, sign it (if necessary,) and then FedEx it back to you.

If you're not dealing with documents that need to be printed, Acrobat is probably not what you need.

 

[Alexis]

Well, Acrobat is meant to deal with many aspects of working with PDFs, hence the high price. The forms are meant to mean you can fill in the boxes, for example on a website where you were applying for a job. In that instance, the PDF would be forwarded one, and not need to be saved. But if you want to save the PDF you just filled out, you're stuck.

 

[technologist]

If you have Acrobat 8 Professional, you can create PDFs that can be edited with just Reader, and then emailed back in its completed state. But the PDF has to be created with that purpose.

Most of the time, you'd be better off using a web form, or even just plain email, if possible.

The vast majority of PDF forms are intended to be printed out, an printing is what PDFs are best at.

 

[Alexis]

It's for a specific job so clients can edit the current document to suit the needs of their specific branch and save it for future reference.

I'll just stick a link to the 30 day Acrobat trial on the CD, but I'm sure there's some sort of freeware out there that can just save PDFs?