PDF Editors That Support Form Filling and Creation (2026 Guide)

Filling a PDF form and creating one are unrelated jobs, and the tools that do them well barely overlap. Filling is mostly about diagnosing what kind of form you have been sent, because there are three kinds and two of them break in different ways. Creating is about whether you actually want a PDF form at all, which you often do not. Our own tool fills forms and cannot create them, and we have corrected this page where it previously suggested otherwise.

Three kinds of form, and how to tell them apart

Open the file and try to click where a name should go.

An AcroForm. The cursor lands in a field and you can type. This is the standard interactive PDF form, with fields stored in the document as a form dictionary: text fields, checkboxes, radio groups, dropdowns and list boxes. Nearly every tool that claims to fill forms means this kind.

An XFA form. Nothing happens, or you see a grey page with a message along the lines of "Please wait. If this message is not eventually replaced by the proper contents of the document, your PDF viewer may not be able to display this type of document." These are built with Adobe's LiveCycle Designer and store the form as XML rather than as PDF form fields. A great many government and tax forms are XFA. Almost nothing outside Adobe's own software can read them, and that includes every browser tool, ours among them, because the library we use has no XFA support. If you see that message, stop looking for a better online tool: download Adobe Acrobat Reader and open it there. That is the answer.

A flat form. A form-shaped page with no fields at all, usually because it was scanned or exported without its fields. Nothing to click and nothing to detect. You fill it by placing text on top of the page, the same way you would write on a printout.

Working out which of the three you have takes five seconds and saves the twenty minutes people spend trying successive websites on an XFA form.

Filling each kind

An AcroForm

Our form filler reads the field list out of the document and presents it as inputs in the panel beside the page: text boxes for text fields, switches for checkboxes, and drop-downs for dropdowns, option lists and radio groups. Fill them in and download, and the values are written into the fields and then flattened.

Be aware of the trade-off in that design, because it is a real one. You are typing into a list rather than onto the page, so you have to match each entry to its position on the form by name. On a well-made form the names are things like "Applicant surname" and this is fine. On many official forms the names look like Topmostsubform[0].Page1[0].f1_07[0], and matching twenty of those to the right boxes is genuinely unpleasant. For a form with cryptic field names, a tool that lets you click directly into the field on the page is the better experience: Adobe Acrobat Reader, which is free, or Apple Preview, or desktop Chrome's built-in PDF viewer, all of which fill AcroForms directly and locally.

The one thing our approach gives you that those do not is a complete list of every field in the document, including any that are positioned off the visible page or are too small to click. Occasionally that is exactly what you need.

An XFA form

Adobe Acrobat Reader, free, on a desktop. There is no workaround worth pursuing. If you cannot install it, print the form, fill it by hand, and scan it, which is faster than the alternatives.

A flat form

Place text on top of the page. Our annotation tool does this, as do Preview, Acrobat Reader and Edge's Draw tool. Two things to know if you use ours: added text uses the standard Helvetica fonts, which cover Latin-1 only, so accented or non-Latin characters will not render correctly; and everything is flattened into the page at download, which for a completed form is what you want anyway.

A practical tip regardless of tool: zoom in before placing anything, match the text size to the printed labels rather than leaving it at the default, and place a signature last.

Flatten before you send it

A completed AcroForm that has not been flattened is still a form. The values sit in editable fields, which means the recipient can change them, different readers render the fields slightly differently, and some printing paths omit field values entirely, so a form that looks complete on screen can print blank. For anything being submitted, flatten it.

Our filler flattens automatically on download. If your tool does not, printing the file to PDF will flatten it as a side effect, at the cost of re-rendering the pages. And if you are bundling several copies of the same form, flatten each one before merging: merged copies of one form produce multiple fields sharing a name, and in the AcroForm model fields with the same name share a value, so typing in one fills the others.

Creating a form, including the free way

First, a question worth asking. If your goal is to collect information from people, a PDF form is usually the wrong instrument. You will receive a pile of files by email, each of which has to be opened and read individually, with no validation on what was entered and no way to total a column. A web form gives you structured, aggregated responses immediately. Choose a PDF form only when the artefact matters: when the recipient needs a document to print, sign, file, or keep as a record, or when the form is a legal instrument in its own right.

If you do want one:

• Adobe Acrobat Pro is the capable option. Its form designer will auto-detect likely fields from an existing layout, which saves a great deal of manual placement, and it handles field validation, calculated fields, tab order and signature fields.
• LibreOffice Writer is the free way, and almost nobody mentions it. It has a Form Controls toolbar for placing text boxes, checkboxes, list boxes and buttons, and its PDF export has a "Create PDF form" option that writes them out as real AcroForm fields. The result is a genuinely fillable PDF, made with free software, entirely offline. The design experience is dated and the output works.
• Online form builders that produce a fillable PDF are worth considering if you also want submissions collected for you, which is the thing they are actually selling.
• RaptorPDF cannot do this. There is no way to add a form field with our tools. This page previously implied we offered basic form creation, which was wrong.

Whatever you use, set a sensible tab order and give fields meaningful names. The cryptic-field-name problem described earlier is created at this stage, and it is the difference between a form people can fill quickly and one they give up on.

Comparison

Tool	Fill AcroForms	XFA forms	Create fields	Files leave your device
RaptorPDF	Yes, via a field list panel; flattens on download	No	No	No
Adobe Acrobat Reader (free)	Yes, click directly into fields	Yes, the only reliable option	No	Not unless you use its cloud features
Apple Preview	Yes	No	No	No
Desktop Chrome or Edge viewer	Yes, and can save the result	No	No	No
LibreOffice Writer	Not its job	No	Yes, free, via Form Controls plus "Create PDF form" on export	No
Adobe Acrobat Pro	Yes	Yes	Yes, with auto-detection, validation and calculations	Desktop version, no

Prices for the commercial tools change, so check the vendor's page. For ours: free covers three operations a day with files up to 50 MB, no watermark and no account, counted at download so filling a form and placing a signature in one session counts once. Pro is $4.99 a month or $39.99 a year with a 300 MB ceiling.

Frequently Asked Questions

Related Resources

• PDF Form Filler — Reads and fills AcroForm fields locally
• Sign a PDF — Add a signature to a completed form
• Sign PDF Guide
• Digital Signatures Guide