PDFill
Create, Fill, Edit, Delete and Submit PDF Form Fields.
What is PDFill?
With PDFill you can create, fill, delete and submit PDF form fields; insert new formatted text, check, image, hyperlink, whiteout, highlight, drawing, comment and annotation anywhere in the document; save, print or email the filled and password-protected PDF; save and resume your filling anytime. PDF Writer is Freeware. PDF Editor is not.
PDFill PDF Tools are FREE PDF Toolbox to Merge, Split off from files with more than 200 pages, Reorder, Encrypt, Decrypt, Rotate (only 90, 180, 270°), Crop, Reformat, Header, Footer, Watermark, Images to PDF, PDF to Images, Form Fields Delete/Flatten/List, PostScript to PDF, PDF Information, Scan to PDF, ...
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PDFill information
Supported Languages
- English
Comments and Reviews
Tags
- PDF Editor
- split-and-join
- extract-images-from-pdf
- pdf-form-creation
- pdf-manipulation
- pdf-markup
List containing PDFill
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asnit added PDFill as alternative(s) to PDFplatform
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I needed to convert an existing multipage PDF into a fillable form, and PDFill is one of the few products I found that does that. It's a little rough around the edges in some areas, but I had no real problems with creating a fillable form with more than 600 fields of various types spread across 6 pages with a bit of JavaScript thrown in to copy or calculate some values around. For the few actual bugs I encountered and reported the developer was very responsive and incorporated fixes rapidly.
A few notes on the form creation process:
The way to create radio buttons is to give each of the radio button controls the same name, but to go to the Options tab and change the value for each one. As far as I'm aware there's no shortcut for going into each radio button individually and changing its name and value appropriately, so if you're doing a full page of Yes/No radio buttons it gets a bit tedious.
The form fields are independent of the underlying PDF page, so if you've created a bunch of fields and need to revise the image underneath you can replace that page within PDFill by importing a page from another PDF to replace the specified one. The fields remain in place, so just fixing a typo in your original source doesn't lose everything.
Setting tab order is awkward at best, but you can specify by clicking each field in order or by letting the program automatically calculate the order based on the field position. If you go the automatic route, there's also an option for "New Tab Order by Table" which actually presents a list of the fields on the current page and lets you tweak the ordering there.
Multiline text fields in the PDF readers (Adobe, PDFX-Change, others?) have a larger top margin for some reason, but the display of sample text in PDFill Editor doesn't have that top margin shown so you may have to fiddle with the positioning of the top of multiline text fields if you're putting them on top of lines on a form. If you have multiline fields like this directly below other fillable fields, make sure you right-click and send the multiline one to the back so when people click on the smaller fields they get the ones they're expecting.
In terms of the competition, Adobe Acrobat DC can do this, reportedly in both Standard and Pro versions, but these days they're pushing you hard to their monthly subscription services of Adobe Acrobat DC for $13+ per month. I thought that the older standalone versions could do it (if you can still find them) though the checklists on Adobe's site that push you to DC indicate that the non-subscription programs can't do anything with forms. Tracker Software's PDF XChange Editor Plus can do this, but you do need the Plus version at ~$55 as I'm writing this to work with fillable forms. I have not experimented with that one. I suspect it's a bit more polished than PDFill, but I'm not sure it adds many additional capabilities and I doubt that they're as responsive.
Finally for accessibility, it's apparently difficult to do a good job of making accessible (screen readable, etc.) PDF forms. Based on my reading part of what you need to do is add the full document structure into the PDF, but the only tools I saw that even mention being able to map the PDF contents to that structure are the ones from Adobe. I'm pretty sure PDFill doesn't support that, and looking at the information on even the highest version of PDFX-Change software didn't seem to indicate any capability to do that either.
PDFill PDF Tools is in fact a toolkit consisting of two separate programs. The product called "PDF Tools" is free, whereas the PDF editor, which is part of the same download, is free to try (with watermark), but costs $20 to use properly. The editor allows you to edit (up to a point) the contents of a page in a PDF document, whereas the rest of the tools work at page level (i.e. add or remove pages, rotate pages, convert to or from PDF etc). This review is about the non-editor part of the bundle.
I've used PDFill PDF Tools on my own PC for a good few years and installed it on many clients' PCs as well. It's good software and works very reliably. More recently, I've switched to PDF Shaper which is a little friendlier, but I still keep PDF Tools to cover certain gaps with PDF Shaper.
The main screen of PDF Tools is simply a list of 15 buttons naming the tasks ("1. Merge PDF Files", "2. Split or Reorder Pages" etc.). Graphic icons along the top represent the same tasks but are completely superflous. When you click a button, you are often prompted to pick a file (or files), and when you have opened them, you get the relevant dialogue box for carrying out the action, followed by the option to save the results into a new file. Sometimes the order is slightly different, but the idea is the same. Here are a couple of examples:
To merge PDFs, click the first button. This will open a dialogue box showing a list of files to be merged, which will initially be empty. Click the "Add a PDF File" button at the top and you will be prompted to choose the PDFs, after which you will be able to change their order, or add more files. Once you have completed this stage, simply click the "Save As..." button at the bottom of the window, name your new PDF and save it.
To Add a header and footer to a PDF, click the relevant button and choose the file. The window now shows you various options for the hearder and footer separately (whether to add them at all, shown them on the first page, show page no. etc as well as options for adding text and selecting formatting options (font, position etc). When you have adjusted all the options to your satisfaction, click the "Save As..." button at the bottom of the window, name your new PDF and save it.
Because all the tasks follow the same basic template, one quickly learns how to use the program and even using a new feature ("Reformat Multiple Pages" anyone?) becomes straightforward. On the other hand, the heavy reliance on text and on choosing files **only ** through the standard dialogue boxes (rather than supporting drag and drop, as some of its competitors do), can make the program a little tiring to use at times. All in all though, it's a capable program which will deal with the requirements of 90% of the people at page level and will do so reliably. For a free program, that's not bad at all!
$19.99 to remove a watermark - only tells you that when you want to save your document! Lot faster than nitroPDF though
I don't begrudge them asking for money, but it should be stated up front.
This is the ONLY tool that allows BATCH extracting images from PDF! There is no other alternative right now! Sure it's closed source, windows only, and it's actually a shareware, but some features are actually very well FREE and there is NO watermark at all!
I was pleasantly surprised to find this software back when Some PDF Image Extract failed me (outdated)
Awesome.
Only with PDFill PDF Tools you can Split very big pdf-files with more than 200 pages for free: The separating of the first 39 German-speaking pages from a TV operating instruction with 235 pages worked neither with "Adolix Split & Merge PDF" (max. 50 sides are possible) nor with "PDF Split and Merge 1.1.4". PDFill PDF Tools is the only excellent free pdf tool with which the Spliten of this so big pdf file functioned perfectly: PDFill PDF Tools are FREE PDF Toolbox to Merge, Split, Reorder, Encrypt, Decrypt, Rotate, Crop, Reformat, Header, Footer, Watermark, Images to PDF, PDF to Images, Form Fields Delete/Flatten/List, PostScript to PDF, PDF Information, Scan to PDF, and Create Transparent Image. Details see http://www.pdfill.com/pdf_tools_free.html
The alignment (rotation) of single pdf pages around a small corner (e.g., 2 °) is not possible with PDFFill (only 90 °, 180 °, 270 °). With
IrfanView one can turn single pdf pages in a pdf document also about only few degrees.