How to fill in a PDF form on a Mac

Most PDF forms can be filled in right on your Mac. Here's how, and what to do when a form won't cooperate.

If the form has fields

Open it in Preview or Stillpage and click into a field: type text, tick check boxes, choose from drop-down lists. Press Tab to move to the next field.

If you can't click into anything

Some PDFs are just pictures of a form, with no fields. You can still fill them in: in Stillpage, click Text, type your answer and click where it goes; use Date and Check for dates and ticks.

Saving a form without breaking it

A form's fields, such as radio-button groups and drop-downs, are defined inside the PDF. Saving a form in apps built on Apple's PDFKit framework, which Preview uses, rewrites that structure. In our tests a radio-button group came back as separate check boxes when the saved file was opened in another app, and the list of fields was duplicated.

Stillpage saves forms by adding your answers to the original file rather than rewriting it, so radio buttons stay radio buttons and the form keeps working in Acrobat and elsewhere.

Forms that only open in Adobe Reader

Some government and insurance forms are built with a technology called XFA. They often show a message such as “Please wait… If this message is not eventually replaced…” in any app other than Adobe Reader. Those forms need Adobe Reader; Stillpage, Preview and most other PDF apps can't fill them.

Other reasons a form won't fill

• It's protected. The author may have locked editing with a password. Ask them for an unlocked copy.
• A field is read-only. Some fields are filled in by whoever sends the form.
• It was flattened. A form that was already filled in and flattened has no fields left; add text on top instead.

Before you send it

Check every page, sign if asked, and save. If you're emailing it, open the saved file once to confirm your answers are there.