How to make a PDF fillable for free, without Acrobat

You have a form as a PDF. People print it, fill it in with a pen, scan it and email it back, and half the time the scan is sideways and the handwriting is a guess. A fillable PDF lets them type straight into it instead.

What makes a PDF "fillable"

A PDF can hold form fields: small interactive objects that sit on the page, each with a name, a type and a value. A text field you can type into, a check box you can tick, a dropdown you can pick from.

A PDF with lines and boxes printed on it is not a form in that sense. It is a picture of one. Click on the blank line and nothing happens, because there is nothing there to click.

Making a PDF fillable means putting real fields where the blanks are. The page itself stays as it was; the fields sit on top of it.

How to make a PDF fillable, step by step

1. Open [PDF Forms](/pdf-forms) and choose your PDF. It can be a normal document, a scan, or a form that already has some fields.
2. Look at the suggestions. The tool reads the lines, boxes and labels on every page and suggests fields where it finds blank lines, empty boxes, check box squares, rows of letter boxes, empty table cells and rows of little circles. Each one is named from the label beside it, so the blank after "Date of birth" becomes a field called Date of birth.
3. Accept what is right. Suggestions that look certain are ticked; the rest are marked as worth a look. Nothing becomes a field until you accept it.
4. Add what it missed. Pick a field type on the left, then click on the page to place it, or drag to draw its size.
5. Fine-tune any field. Select it to change its name, mark it required, add help text, set a starting value, or change its font, size, colours and border.
6. Check the tab order. Row by row, top to bottom is the default. Move fields in the list to set your own order; the Tab key follows it in every PDF app.
7. Try the form. The preview lets you fill it in the way your readers will, pressing Tab to move between fields. Nothing you type there is saved into the file.
8. Create the fillable PDF and download it. The file name ends in -fillable.pdf.

The field types you can add

Which to choose for which question, and the settings each one has, are covered in how to add check boxes, dropdowns and date fields.

Will it work in Adobe Reader, Chrome and on other computers?

Yes. The fields are standard PDF form fields, each with its own appearance drawn into the file, so they can be filled in and saved in Adobe Acrobat and Reader, Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Foxit and other PDF apps. Required fields, read-only fields and the tab order go with the file.

One honest caveat: filling depends on the app doing the filling. A few very basic viewers display the fields but cannot type into them. That is the viewer, not the form, and opening the file in a browser or a full PDF reader solves it.

Starting from a Word document

Build the layout in Word or any word processor, leaving blank lines, underscores and boxes where the answers go. Convert it with Word to PDF, then open the PDF in PDF Forms. The blank lines and underscores are exactly what the detection looks for, so a cleanly laid-out document gets good suggestions.

When the PDF already has fields

Existing fields open in place. You can move, restyle, rename or delete them, and add new ones beside them. Fields you do not touch are kept exactly as they were, including their values and any calculations or checks they run.

A few PDFs also carry a second, Adobe-only kind of form called XFA, which other viewers cannot read. The fillable PDF keeps the standard form every app can read, and removes the XFA part so every viewer shows the same fields.

Things that get in the way

A password. A PDF that needs a password to open has to be unlocked first with Unlock PDF.

A digital signature. Saving a new version changes the file, so an existing digital signature will show as no longer valid. The tool warns you before you start.

A scan. Scans work, with one extra step. See how to turn a scanned form into a fillable PDF.

Other alphabets. Fields use Helvetica, Times or Courier for Latin text. A starting value in another script, such as Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic, Devanagari, Bengali or Thai, gets a font that covers it embedded in the file. A starting value in Chinese, Japanese or Korean is stored in the form and drawn by the reader's own PDF app. Whatever people type in later is drawn by their app, too.

What a fillable PDF does not do

It does not collect answers for you. The person fills the form in, saves it and sends it back, exactly as they would any file. There is no online form hosting and no submissions inbox.

If the form needs signing by several people, each field can note which signer should fill it. That note is kept in the PDF, so the form can go to Request Signatures later without placing its fields again.

Where your file goes

Detecting and writing the fields runs on our server, so the PDF is uploaded. It is not kept: each request carries the file, and it is gone once the response has been sent back.