Free Tool to Type on PDFs – Save or Print PDF Forms

formspdfscanningwindows

I have a large number of paper forms which I need to complete. I'd like to scan them in, then type the answers onto them in the relevant spaces and print them out, rather than writing on them with a pen (my handwriting is terrible).

I can scan and generate PDFs without a problem, but I'm looking for a free tool which will let me type text over the top of the scanned PDF, and let me at least print the final output. Saving would be good too but isn't essential.

I'm running Windows 7. Any suggestions? Would the Adobe Acrobat free trial let me do this? I could scan the forms as images and set them up as background images in Word but I've got hundreds of pages and I'd like something quicker and simpler.

Best Answer

Try also PDF-XChange Editor: free, light and complete!!

Related Solutions

Freeware program for editing the text stream of PDFs

Free PDF editors are very scarce.

The only free one I know is OpenOffice with Sun PDF Import Extension.

From the techsupportalert article A PDF File Allows Editing in 100% Layout Accuracy:

Sun PDF Import ExtensionOpenOffice with Sun PDF Import Extension produces a hybrid PDF / ODF file. The file created will have a normal .pdf file extension. By itself, it is a PDF file and can be viewed by any PDF viewer such as Adobe Reader, PDF-XChange Viewer or Foxit Reader.

On top of this, it contains a source ODF file, which can be opened with OpenOffice directly from the PDF file for editing without loosing any layouts, bookmarks, hyperlinks or formats.

To create a hybrid PDF file, run OpenOffice with Sun PDF Import Extension installed, select "File", choose "Export as PDF", a PDF Options window like the screen shot will open, then tick "Create hybrid file" and click "Export".

This hybrid PDF file saves you in keeping two separate file formats as it has combined two into one. It is ready for sharing and viewing with a PDF reader, yet it can be opened for perfect editing just the way a normal OpenOffice file can be. Probably it will be a good idea to name the hybrid file ending with "-odf.pdf" to differentiate from the normal PDF file.

Sun PDF Import Extension is compatible with OpenOffice.org (3.0 or later) or StarOffice 9.

Linux – Scan-to-PDF software for Linux

Here are some things that I found when researching this earlier this year. Sorry, I can't post more than one hyperlink due to my limited rating, so you'll have to Google for the links.

gscan2pdf

A really good GUI system that can use various OCR engines for the backend. This probably will meet your one-touch solution (and digitxp already mentioned it).

Tesseract OCR Engine

Can be used with gscan2pdf.

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/9676

Ocropus

I didn't get very far with ocropus since it wasn't recognizing text without extensive training. It would probably be really good for books, but didn't work well for me with bills and such. YMMV.

Cuneiform

I had the best success with Cuneiform and was able to create searchable PDF's by scripting commands similar to the following workflow:

# extract images from scans
# (not shown)

# convert to black-and-white
optimize2bw -n -i nuance-test.png  -o bw.bmp                               

# do the OCR process and generate an hOCR file
cuneiform -l eng -f hocr -o nuance-test.html bw.bmp

# reassemble the original image with the hOCR file to generate a new PDF
hocr2pdf -s -i nuance-test.png -o nuance-test.hocr.pdf < nuance-test.html

You will also need to install the exactimage package.

Various open-source projects for OCR'ing PDF's use Cuniform and hocr2pdf as well:

WatchOCR
Archivista

Let me know what you find out!