[pkaye]

My main concern with this kind of service is that most of the times I fill out a form it has personal information which I don't want to risk leaking somewhere which is why I prefer local apps that don't transmit over the internet.

[samadmin]

It's a valid concern which is why form.ac data is stored locally and is only transferred to generate the form and is then erased from the server. I think it should be possible to do it all client side with a modern browser but I haven't had a chance to do a proof of concept of that yet.

It's also worth considering what you do after you've filled the form locally. Do you then email it somewhere? What does the receiving organisation do with it? Unfortunately there are potential security pitfalls in many parts of the process.

[ldenoue]

Do you think PDFjs could be extended to write new text inside the PDF, all client side? At the moment I’m only aware of PDFBox from Apache to do this, but that’s server side JAVA...

[samadmin]

Yes PDFjs is what we are looking at for a full client side version. However we've had issues with larger pdf's/images and localstorage limits.

[samadmin]

I would be interested to know which app you prefer and if you found the form.ac interface easier to use than your local apps or if you really found no advantage with it?

[stephenr]

Not sure about the person you replied to but Preview on macOS has done this sort of thing for fucking years, and it stores/reads my digital signature (ie a vector of my actual signature) to/from keychain.

I never understood the market for web apps like this until I realised Windows must not have this out of the box (presumably?)

[samadmin]

Thanks. It seems like preview is the go to option for mac users. For me it was missing a couple of features but I'm also looking towards a mobile solution for users on tablets.

[stephenr]

The markup feature on iOS is essentially the same toolset.

[cpach]

I recently had to edit a PDF on my work computer (which run Windows 10) and it was quite cumbersome to do compared to OS X. I finally managed to do it by installing Libreoffice Draw.

[samadmin]

I trust form.ac would have been an easier option that that?

[cpach]

Definitely!