In a word, no. Professional tax agents have systems that avoid the forms, there are systems that avoid some of the forms but the rest are this old-style non-fillable form.
That would be a waste of time because I often overtype pdf forms, and this is only one type of form. I imagine many people overtype non-fillable forms and I’m seeking discussion on the process.
I think that’s the wrong approach:
- The form exists, there is no opportunity to redesign it in Writer
- Intention is to fill in the form, not create fields (maybe that will come)
btw, I deliberately didn’t specify the app because I thought there might be a solution with Draw I couldn’t see.
The accepted approach seems to be open the document up and draw virtual input boxes over the document then save them as a fillable pdf. The tools I’ve seen are all fairly arbitrary freehand drawing tools and the form has well-defined data entry areas which should be used. Anyway, I don’t see the need for a form, just the ability to overtype it.
As I see it:
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I like that Writer works well with multipage documents and character spacing is an important feature. It doesn’t automatically insert multipage pdfs as background and it’s not a drawing tool but Text boxes are close enough.
- Break pdf into separate images
- In Writer create a new page for each image and insert the image in page at 100%
- Set up margin and snapping
- Insert text boxes at the required locations
Some observations:
- It’s fiddly adding each background image page, probably a macro task
- Despite putting the image in the background, clicking the page to add a text box selects the image
- It would be nice to click [snap] a location and have a Text box just grow to the correct size using the required character style
Any comments on the workflow?
