[jatsign]

The relatively small company I work for makes me fill out some forms by hand, because they receive them from vendors as a PDF. So I print it out, sign it, and return it to my company by hand.

If someone could make a service that lets you upload a PDF that contains a form, and then let users fill out that form and e-sign it and collect the results, and then print them out all at once, it would be great.

It's not a billion dollar idea but there are a lot of little companies that would save a lot of time using it.

[nathan_f77]

There are quite a few services that should be able to solve this problem (turning a PDF into a web form and collecting signatures.) Here's a few of the services I'm aware of:

* https://www.hellosign.com/products/helloworks

* https://www.useanvil.com

* https://www.pandadoc.com

* https://www.pdffiller.com

* https://www.platoforms.com

* JotForm (https://www.jotform.com/help/433-How-to-Add-an-E-Signature-t...)

* https://www.webmerge.me

(I know about all these because I'm working on a PDF generation service for developers called DocSpring [1]. I'm also working on e-signature support [2], but that's still under development, and still won't be a perfect fit for your use-case.)

[1] https://docspring.com

[2] https://docspring.com/docs/data_requests.html

[edent]

I use Xournal - https://sourceforge.net/projects/xournal/

It lets me type in to forms - or draw text over them if necessary. Then I paste in a scan of my signature. Then save as a PDF an email across.

I've been doing this for years. Job applications, mortgages, medical questionnaires. No one has every queried it.

If you're hand delivering a printed PDF, it's just going to be copy-typed by a human into a computer. No need to make it too fancy.

[moftz]

I used Xournal for a couple years in college. It was perfect in how simple it was to mix handwritten and typed notes or markup documents. The only thing is that I wish it had some sort of notebook organization feature. It would have been nice keeping all of my course notes in one file, broken down by chapter or daily pages. Instead, I ended up with a bunch of individual xojs that did the job but made searching for material take longer.

[coob]

macOS's preview will let you do all of this also.

[52-6F-62]

Coming from a documents format world (publishing), there are a lot of cases like this.

In theory it sounds like it should be straightforward but it hinges so much on how well the document is structured underneath the surface.

Being that these tools were primarily designed for non-technical users first the priority is in the visual and printed outcome and not the underlying structure.

One document can look much the same as another in form—uses black borders to outline fields, similar or same field names, etc, but may be structured entirely differently and that can be a madhouse of frustrating problems.

It can be complex enough to write a solution for one specific document source. Writing a universal tool that could take in any form like that would probably be a pretty decent moneymaker.

My first intuition, though, would be it may be more successful (though no less simple) to develop a model that can read from the visual of the document rather than parsing it successfully.

Open to learning something here, though!

[aty268]

Out of curiosity, what exactly are non-technical people doing with PDF's, and why does there need to be a universal tool in the space? What would the tool do with the extracted data?

[52-6F-62]

All kinds of things. PDF is the unifying data exchange format for a lot of businesses who use computers at some end to manage things and need to exchange documents of any kind without relying on the old "can you open Word files?" type problems.

There is a wide world outside of consumers of SaaS products for every little niche problem.

Sometimes they are baked in processes that still use PDF's to share information, sometimes they're old forms of any kind, sometimes even old scanned docs that are still in use but shared digitally. A lot of the businesses that carry on that way are of the mind that "if it's not broke, don't fix it" which is quite rational for their problem areas and existing knowledge base. They might be a potential market at some point for a new solution, but good luck selling them on a web-based subscription SaaS solution when a simple form has been serving their needs for 30+ years.

OP's problem of the PDF being the go-between to digital endpoints is more common than you might think.

The universality I was referring to was the wide range of possibilities for how a given form might be laid out. And old documents contain a lot of noise when they've been added to or manipulated. Look inside an old PDF form from some small-medium sized business sometime. Now imagine 1000 variations of that form one standard problem. Then multiple that by the number of potential problem areas the forms are managing.

Also like OP said—it's not sexy, but it's very real and having an intelligent PDF form reader and consumer would be a time-saver for those businesses who aren't geared to completely alter their workflow.

The tool could do anything with the extracted data. If it allowed you to connect to any of your in house services (like payroll or accounting) either with a quick config/API or a custom patch, or Google Drive, or whatever without complications like online-required and web accounts especially. No whole solution like that exists to my knowledge. At least nothing accessible to the wider market.

[aty268]

Thanks for the comment, this is really interesting. I guess i'm still confused what people actually do with these PDF's though. Are people looking at a PDF sent to them and manually entering that data somewhere else (like payroll or accounting), so this tool would take that data from the PDF and pump it in there automatically?

Thanks again, I just want to make sure I understand.

[jagged-chisel]

I assume you mean a drawn form as opposed to a true PDF form. The former would be difficult to parse automatically into inputs.

OTOH, a PDF form works exactly they way you’d like. Maybe there’s a small market in helping convert one to the other for collecting input from old paper-ish forms.

[travisporter]

Would DocuSign work? I’ve signed for lease documents several times that way.

[jatsign]

Something like that would work for signing, but the hard part is "turn this pdf into an online form". That way after a user finishes a form, you can perform some basic error checking like, did they fill out everything, is this field a valid format, etc. After 100 employees turn in a multi-page printed out form, someone has to go through it and make sure they signed everywhere, filled out all the fields, etc.

Again, not sexy, but it is so stupid I have to fill out a direct deposit form by hand and turn it into my company, who checks it, then hands it off to the payroll vendor, who has to check it, just to enter the damn data into a form on their end.

[izacus]

Well, PDF forms support all of this already, so why not just add validation inside the PDF?

[pintxo]

iPad OS should also be able to do this. Especially if you have the pen.

[coob]

hellosign.com does exactly this