Solving the mystery of the empty PDF form
I love filling out forms—they’re like tests where I know all the answers. Starting in Mountain Lion, entering data in PDF forms got even easier; Preview can now automatically detect where form fields are, so blanks automatically become text fields where you can type and checkboxes can simply be clicked.
Great as that is, when I sent those filled-out PDF forms to some of my colleagues, I found they’d often reply that the form I’d sent them was empty. And yet, when I opened the same document on my own computer, the data I entered was still there. What gives?
Well, after a little investigation I determined that the problem seems to be—surprise!—that those folks are Windows users. For some reason, the software they use to view PDFs (likely Adobe Acrobat) doesn’t recognize whatever Preview is doing to support entering that form data, so those PDFs simply register as empty.
Save a PDF, save the world: Printing to a PDF will ensure your form entries stay put.
As it turns out, the fix is simple, but a little silly: After you’ve filled out a PDF form in Preview, choose Print from the File menu and then use the dialog box’s PDF option to save it to a PDF.
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http://www.macworld.com/article/2027181/solving-the-mystery-of-the-empty-pdf-form.html
