One of the common requests I get from readers is for software that
lets you fill out PDF forms. Of course, if a PDF was actually
produced as a full-featured form with editable fields, the free Adobe
Reader and (in Tiger, at least) OS X’s own Preview let you fill in
those fields. Unfortunately, I get a lot of PDF forms that don’t
include editable fields—the sender expects me to print out the form,
fill it out, and then fax or send it back. The solution for me has
been to use one of a number of commercial software titles that let
you add text to such PDFs, such as SmileOnMyMac’s $50 PDFpen and $95
PDFpenPro, full versions of Adobe Acrobat, the $30 FormMate, or even
the $30 GraphicConverter.
(There’s actually a kludgy way to use Microsoft Word, Pages, or
OmniGraffle to fill out forms—by using the PDF as a background
layer—but it works only with single-page PDFs and it’s, well,
kludgy.)
Andrew de los Reyes offers a low-cost alternative to these commercial
products in the form—no pun intended—of Formulate 0.0.1 (;
payment requested). This tiny app does one thing, and one thing only:
it lets you type text onto PDFs.
http://www.macworld.com/weblogs/macgems/2006/12/formulate/index.php
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