How do I type into an existing fillable PDF?
The problem: When I open a fillable PDF, Draw automatically opens it in edit mode. That makes it impossible to type into fillable boxes and lines. When I ask for help, all Help files discuss how to create a fillable PDF and none discuss how to type into an existing fillable PDF.
There is hardly ever any reason to open any PDF with LibreOffice. Just open the PDF with your favorite PDF viewer. No, it does not need to be Adobe Acrobat.
If your goal is to use the fillable PDF to submit an application to the issuing body, use a PDF reader.
You didn’t mention your OS name, so I can only suggest “generic” portable readers like Adobe Acrobat Reader but others are possible depending on your platform.
We could also suggest to search a bit for recent answers:
(INCOMING RANT AS MY SUGGESTION)
I don’t know why LO doesn’t just add support to fill PDFs. It’s such a basic thing that every single person wants/needs. I’ve never met a single person who needs to “edit” or “create” a PDF. I’ve only known those who USE them. And to suggest to those people who are looking for an alternative to Adobe to just go “use their favorite PDF reader like Adobe” is effing luddacris. Simple as that. Come on LibreOffice devs…come on.
The software is called LibreOffice. Can you imagine some offices actually sending invoices as pdf? And somebody actually created the pdf, you wish to fill. So maybe an Office-suite is software for them and you should just use a more simple program to fill your pdf.
Imho there is not much overlapping with existing topics. So it would be no advantage to include it. I don’t think there is an idea to include everything simple in LibreOffice, just because it is possible.
.
(And if you’d know anything of the topic, you’d see it is not that simple, as there is more than one “standard” created by Adobe, and that is not even counting the forms, which are “impoved” by javascript…)
You can watch movies without movie production software.
You can watch pictures without Photoshop.
You can listen to music without sound editing software.
You can use web-pages without web development suite.
You can read pdf and fill out pdf forms without desktop publisher, office suite nor CAD software.
A modern browser can handle all above media, regardless of origin.
There is no need to add another pdf viewer, media player, web-browser, email client to this office suite. LibreOffice is about nothing but office documents.
Simply because LO does not manage PDFs. It can produce PDFs from some document source but afterwards LO forgets about it. Draw has a very limited ability to display PDFs but considers them as a collection of shapes and handles them just like a graphics file; nothing more.
Filling-in a PDF form to get (smartly) a modified PDF is a task for an adequate PDF viewer.
By the way, your “rant” is not an answer to the initial problem and should not have been submitted as a “solution”. You should have used a comment.
Sorry, I’m still a noob finding my way. I love all of your answers to my rant. And I truly appreciate the courtesy in your responses @Wanderer @Villeroy
I guess it’s just that I as a noob had been promised all these things…these alternatives, and not truly knowing them from experience, and then trying to break the chains from our tech overlords that when something doesn’t turn out as easy or as accessible it makes me just want to keep being a slave. Which sucks. But thank you all for your education and replies!
You know that Firefox is good pdf reader and can fill in pdf forms? Just enter the path to the PDF into the address bar ( delete any surrounding double quotes or it will do a search instead)