创建 PDF 表单

这款工具的作用

This adds real form fields to a document that has none. You draw each field where it belongs on the rendered page, and the file that comes out carries named AcroForm fields that any reader can fill - not text boxes drawn as artwork. Positions are chosen by dragging rather than typed as numbers, because a field belongs to a spot on the page and no set of coordinates would be quicker or more accurate than putting a box where the line already is.

Use it when a form keeps getting printed, filled by hand and scanned back: a leave request, a delivery note, a membership application, a supplier questionnaire. It is also what you want after designing a form in Word or InDesign, where the layout is right but nothing is fillable.

工作原理

1. Drop the PDF onto this page. It is rendered so you work on the page you can see.
2. Leave the proposal option on for a first pass, then accept, move or delete what it suggests.
3. Drag out any further fields and set what each one needs: its kind, a name, a tooltip, whether it is required, and the choices for a dropdown or a radio group.
4. Check the names. Two fields sharing a name are one field in PDF, which is right for a radio group and a bug anywhere else.
5. Press Create form and download the fillable document.

Six kinds of field are offered and five of them are created here: a text box, a tick box, a radio group, a dropdown and a scrolling option list. A signature field is refused rather than faked, because pdf-lib can read one but not create one, and a hand-built signature field with no byte range shows in readers as a broken signature rather than an empty one. Sign PDF adds a real one.

Every field created here gets a hairline border and a pale wash, and its appearance stream is generated before anyone clicks it. This is not decoration. A field with no border and no background renders as an invisible rectangle, the person opening your form sees a blank page, clicks nothing, and concludes the form does not work.

A text box taller than 32 points is made multiline automatically, so a comments box wraps instead of scrolling one line sideways. The label you give a field is written as its tooltip, which is the only label a field carries in the file itself - readers show it on hover and screen readers read it out, so it is worth filling in even when the printed text beside the box says the same thing.

Up to 500 fields in one pass, and the names have to be unique except within a radio group, where sharing a name is what makes the buttons mutually exclusive. Automatic proposal looks for the marks that mean write here - long horizontal rules, empty boxes, rows of dots - and it proposes rather than applies, because a wrong field is more annoying to remove than a missing one is to add.

The page is rendered, the fields are placed and the document is written entirely inside your browser. A blank internal form and a signed one are treated the same way, since neither is transmitted at any point.