What is this obsession with PDF? Read by the idiot masses, created by the mysterious few, available to download all over the place. I needed to edit an application form yesterday for Clarkson and it took hours just to enter even just a single word. Why would an uneditable format be used for something that is next to useless unless edited in some way. Perhaps they are expecting a series of job applications, all the same but for a scrappy covering email and a descriptive filename.

Of course their real thinking is to print the form out. Yes, get on Internet, download form, download associated viewing software, print form and then after getting that far, start scibbling.

There are ways to avoid submitting a scrawled mess of smudged biro. You could print-screen and import into word as an image and then type over it, but this has it’s own problems of lack of space and text alignment oddities.

Searching on google for solutions to this dilema revealed a whole cottage industry for PDF converters all of which promise much but deliver little, given the unnecessary nature of this task.

Unbelievably even Adobe Acrobat Professional, the package presumably used to create the form in the first place was of little use. It transpired that although the form had been drawn/typed or whatever, but no actual form in the input field sense of the word had been created. So I had to add about 50 fields into the gaps using Acrobats horrid interface presumably designed to trip up anyone with a passing knowledge of microsoft word or equivilent.

Anyway once I had ‘enabled reader features’, the most important of which was to give the reader the ability to write, I was away. Bloody thing.