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There's quite a few solutions for typing on PDFs (such as listed in the answers to PDF - What software to fill-out/fill-in a PDF form?), but I have a parallel question which I've wondered about off-and-on for a couple of years now.
Is there a way to fill up PDF forms which use boxes such that each character is in a box. Most of these are scanned or re-created versions of old printed-out forms (e.g. all the banks in my country have these), and it's currently way more work to use some software to type one character, press spacebar a few times to move the cursor to the next box, and repeat than just to print the thing out, fill it up by hand, and take a picture or scan it.
Here's some bad ASCII art (hand-made) showing what I mean.
|--------------------------------------------------------| | _ _ _ _ | | Please fill in your birth year: | || || || | | | - - - - | |--------------------------------------------------------|
Very laborious using a typical PDF app to type over it, you'd need to align every character. Surely this isn't a niche area, and there's a software method to automatically fill in each box?
Ng Oon-Ee
Posted 2017-02-06T06:59:37.830
Reputation: 165
Essentially, if it's just a 'photo' of an old printed form, nothing will find the boxes. It would probably be simpler to add plain white over where the boxes are, then just type new data over the top. – Tetsujin – 2017-02-06T07:07:00.430
That's an interesting idea, but when dealing with stickier entities like banks this may (or may not, no idea myself) cause issues. Surely some simple image processing could solve this, though? Pretty sure I'm not the only one to be frustrated at this. – Ng Oon-Ee – 2017-02-06T09:24:31.457
Those old forms were designed to be read by a scanner specifically designed for the purpose. If they're still using one all these years later, then who knows what the rest of their IT setup is like. If they're actually getting some poor secretary to type them in by hand [which wouldn't surprise me] then it really wouldn't matter how the info was presented. – Tetsujin – 2017-02-06T09:30:39.127
The secretary option is most likely (my own judgement), but as an end-user I'm mostly just concerned that I don't get forms rejected for trying to be too clever. – Ng Oon-Ee – 2017-02-06T09:34:03.633