MacOS – How to make non-editable non-savable PDF into editable and savable

adobemacospdf

My university provides forms such as here in non-editable and non-savable form (it also has some odd sign such as 'Print form' that I need to remove). I am able to print the document with Illustrator and edit it this way even without the 'Print form' but if I print it through browser, it has this odd sign 'Print form'. I don't want to rewrite things again-and-again. Is it possible to make the PDF so that people without Illustrator were able to edit and save it?

Is there a way to make the PDF editable and savable in OS X?
Is the only way do it with Adobe Illustrator?

Best Answer

Preview in Mountain Lion allows you to inform all the fields available in that form. If you need to actually remove fields, you can use Infix to convert it to a standard PDF.

I just tried on the link you gave and it worked perfectly.

Related Solutions

Print to pdf with Adobe Reader

Adobe Reader 10.x does go out of it's way to hide the normal print options from OS X but you can still get to them by clicking on the Printer... button at the bottom of the Adobe Print Dialog and clicking through the warning not to change things behind Adobe's back.

I don't have a form like you mentioned in red, but try setting all the print options in Adobe to make your form appear as desired (with or without stamps, annotations, sticky notes and summaries, etc...) and then get to the Apple print dialog to attempt a print to PDF.

If Adobe isn't preparing the file for print until after you hit print in the Adobe dialog - then your only recourse is faking it out by defining a new virtual printer. That way adobe is forced to send the data to the mac which will then pop it into a plainer PDF file for you with just the data filled out.

I've not resorted to this, but CUPS-PDF and this tip on making it work with Snow Leopard's sandboxing security looks to be promising. I hope you don't have to resort to that hacky of a solution to save paper waste and time.

MacOS – How to extract all pages of a PDF into individual PDF documents

I remember looking to do the same thing a few years ago and lo and behold, I still had the link in deep archive: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1354754

A MacRumors Forums member named Oligarch put together a bunch of command-line pdf tools, which can be downloaded from this link: http://users.skynet.be/tools/

The pdfburst command is what you need:

NAME
     pdfburst -- burst (split) PDF documents into single pages

SYNOPSIS
     pdfburst file [path]

DESCRIPTION
     The pdfburst utility bursts (splits) the PDF document file into single
     pages which it writes to path, appended by an underscore character and
     zero-padded page numbers.

     If file is a single dash (-), the PDF document is read from the standard
     input.

     If path is omitted, the base name (last path component) of file is used
     and the single page files are created in the current working directory.

     If path ends with a slash (/), it designates a directory and the single
     page files are named with just the page number.

     Missing directories along path are created.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Print to pdf with Adobe Reader

MacOS – How to extract all pages of a PDF into individual PDF documents

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