I came across an interesting tool for creating fillable forms recently released by OnlyOffice. I think it looks promising and thought it would be worth sharing, even though the article title is self-promoting, since it was written by OnlyOffice to market this feature.
One of the challenges I have is creating an editable fillable forms (in our case test reports) from a Word Document that I can keep updating and publishing to PDF. Libreoffice and Word and Form Tools, but I have not found that they translate well to PDF (if at all) or are easy to lay out. While I have not used Acrobat, I have also tried FoxIt PDF Reader and PDFOffice by Readdle before it was discontinued. The main challenge with those two is that the auto-detect form would not detect fields and place fields where they were not needed. Additionally, any time I needed to update the form, I need to autodetect the fields again, and following that, convert them to other types, like dates, signatures, and more. In this respect, FoxIt was even more limited because all autodetected fields are text boxes and cannot be changed to other types: Any non-text field has to be manually laid out.
The main benefits of the solution by OnlyOffice is that you can take a word document and save it in their OFORM file format that is an extended form of .docx . Following that, you can add fields, continue editing the document, and publish revisions to it to PDF. The limitations so far are the limited types of fields currently available. There is no Date Field or Signature Field, which is significant. I also don't see an option to clone a field so data entered in one field is autofilled in another field on another page. Hopefully will get addressed in later releases. Despite that, I think it is still going to be a time-saver for myself.
Note: I am not affiliated with OnlyOffice. I came across this on LWN and then across more information on the form functionality, which I thought would be worth sharing, and got approval from Dang to post this (https://lwn.net/Articles/881812/).
One of the challenges I have is creating an editable fillable forms (in our case test reports) from a Word Document that I can keep updating and publishing to PDF. Libreoffice and Word and Form Tools, but I have not found that they translate well to PDF (if at all) or are easy to lay out. While I have not used Acrobat, I have also tried FoxIt PDF Reader and PDFOffice by Readdle before it was discontinued. The main challenge with those two is that the auto-detect form would not detect fields and place fields where they were not needed. Additionally, any time I needed to update the form, I need to autodetect the fields again, and following that, convert them to other types, like dates, signatures, and more. In this respect, FoxIt was even more limited because all autodetected fields are text boxes and cannot be changed to other types: Any non-text field has to be manually laid out.
The main benefits of the solution by OnlyOffice is that you can take a word document and save it in their OFORM file format that is an extended form of .docx . Following that, you can add fields, continue editing the document, and publish revisions to it to PDF. The limitations so far are the limited types of fields currently available. There is no Date Field or Signature Field, which is significant. I also don't see an option to clone a field so data entered in one field is autofilled in another field on another page. Hopefully will get addressed in later releases. Despite that, I think it is still going to be a time-saver for myself.
Note: I am not affiliated with OnlyOffice. I came across this on LWN and then across more information on the form functionality, which I thought would be worth sharing, and got approval from Dang to post this (https://lwn.net/Articles/881812/).