PDF Forms in Preview Not working

I had this problem too and it was killing me. To top it off, Adobe Acrobat, would not allow me to print and save as a pdf. In Preview you can print and save as a pdf which basically gives you a read only view of the pdf, which I like to send people. So what I ended up doing was using Adobe Acrobat to save as PNG's. Then with a little imagemagick I converted the png's into pdfs.

for i in *.png; do convert "${i}" "${i}.pdf"; done

Now I had x amount of pdf files, one for each page. I needed to merge them back again. At first I tried using imagemagick to do this, but the results were less that stellar.

final="";for i in *.pdf; do final="$final ${i}"; done; convert "${final}" my-final.pdf

Reading superuser gave me a solution. From the http://superuser.com/questions/54041/how-to-merge-pdfs-using-imagemagick-resolut ion-problem post I came up with the following that worked great.

final="";for i in *.pdf; do final="$final ${i}"; done; pdftk $final cat output my-final.pdf

Yeah, its a bit lengthy of a process but you know what, it works and I'm okay with the command line so, its a solution if you're a risk taker

--

Andrew

Thank YOU for mentioning it. I just re-downloaded Lion via the AppStore and installed it - it's actually true, Preview now handles multi-line text fields in PDF files correctly!

Great news. Cheers Apple!

Well, I'm afraid it is not quite time yet to break out the champagne.

Multi-line form fields are handled better, although the spacing between the lines still changes slightly when you exit a field. At least it is legible now. However, the completed form is still corrupted: after completing the form in Preview, try opening it in Acrobat Pro. All of the filled out fields will appear blank. If you click on a field to select it, the text you had entered in Preview appears, but it disappears again when you click on a different field.

The corrupted form can be repaired by adding a blank space to the end of the field in Acrobat Pro, or equivalently by using the Applescript script described in one of the earlier posts.

C'mon Apple -- you're almost there!

Not only that but for me, it's basically still useless because boxes that are supposed to be programmed to add numbers don't work and are "stuck" on zero, and aren't manually editable, either. The only form that I want to use regularly has this feature and although I've seen a couple improvements from the other fixes they made, it still is a big deal that the column that's supposed to add numbers won't do it, neither in Preview nor Acrobat. I know how it's "supposed" to work only because I've been told by PC-users, and also it works fine when I'm editing it in a browser. That does me little good though because it's a form you fill out on a daily basis each week. The adding column is supposed to add the numbers from each day so it gives you a weekly total. If you do it in a browser, you can't save your data day-to-day obviously. It would only work if I left that browser window open all the time and never shut my computer down.

I don't have a question, just meant this post as additional commentary. But if anybody does have any helpful input on my problem, I'd love to hear it. I only mentioned it since nobody had written about that specific problem yet in this thread.

Melanie