You have a scanned paper form, or a clean but “mute” document: impossible to type into the boxes without printing it. The Create a form tool turns that static PDF into an interactive form: fields your recipients fill directly on screen before sending it back to you.
What the tool adds, honestly
Two field types, positioned manually:
- Text field — name, address, date, amount: a free input area.
- Checkbox — yes/no, stacked multiple choices.
Each field is defined by five values: name (the field’s identifier in the form), page (zero-indexed), x, y, width and height. The name matters: it is what identifies the answer when the form comes back filled.
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The right hardware
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The PDF coordinates trap
This is the detail that trips everyone up on the first try: in a PDF, the origin is at the bottom left, not the top. The y coordinate is therefore measured from the bottom of the page. To place a field 100 points from the top of an A4 page (842 points tall), you need y = 742.
Useful landmarks:
- A4: 595 × 842 points; Letter: 612 × 792 points.
- The panel’s default form suggests
x=50, y=700— a good starting point near the top of the page. - Field one notch too high or too low? Decrease
yto move down, increase it to move up — the opposite of intuition.
The workflow that works
- Open the PDF, spot the target page and the field location.
- Estimate the coordinates from the bottom of the page, create the field, download and open the result in a reader: the box appears where you put it.
- Adjust by shifting
yin steps of 10-20 points until the alignment is right — two or three iterations are usually enough. - Repeat for each field (at least one field is required to run the operation; the limit is the document: 50 MiB, 1,000 pages).
What to combine next
The created form can be filled in a compatible reader — but the full cycle has three steps in Document Flare: create the fields here, fill them to pre-complete known values, then flatten (same article) to freeze everything into the final document — the field disappears, the content becomes permanent.
Frank limitations
- No visual editor. Positioning is by coordinates, not drag-and-drop: plan for the iterations described above.
- Two types only. For a choice list, stack checkboxes.
- Filling depends on the recipient’s reader — a standard AcroForm opens in Acrobat and most browsers, but some minimalist previews display the field without allowing input.
In short: to make a PDF fillable without desktop software or sending it to an online service, it’s two field types and one reflex — think of y from the bottom of the page.
