How to Fill Out a PDF Form for Free, Fillable or Not
The short answer
Open the form in Edit PDF and pick Fill & Sign. If the PDF has real form fields, choose Fill form fields (shortcut F) and type into the boxes. If it is a flat form, a scan or a printout saved as PDF, use Text to type on the lines, the ✓ ✗ ● marks for checkboxes, Date for dates, and Signature or Initials to sign. Then press Download PDF and open the copy you saved to check it.
The file is opened and filled inside your browser tab and is not uploaded. There is no sign-up.
The rest of this guide explains the three kinds of PDF form you will meet, because the right method depends on which one you have.
First, find out which kind of form you have
| Kind of form | How to spot it | How to fill it |
|---|---|---|
| Fillable form (AcroForm) | Boxes you can click and type into; the editor says “N fillable fields in this PDF” | Fill form fields |
| Flat form | Printed lines and boxes, but nothing to click; the editor says the PDF has no fillable fields | Text, ✓ ✗ ●, Date, Signature |
| XFA form | A page that only says “Please wait…” in a browser or in most PDF apps | Usually needs Adobe Reader or Acrobat (see below) |
Open the file in the editor and choose Fill form fields. It counts the fields for you. If there are none, it tells you so and suggests Text, Date or the ✓ marks instead.
Filling a fillable form
Fillable forms carry their own fields, so the editor puts a typing box over each one. Text fields, multi-line boxes, checkboxes, radio buttons, drop-down lists and list boxes all work. Click a field and type, or click a checkbox or radio button to set it. Fields the form’s author marked read-only stay locked.
Your answers are written into the form’s own fields when you download, so another PDF reader shows them as filled fields, not as text pasted on top.
Two things the form itself won’t do for you:
- It won’t check your answers. The IRS says this plainly about its own fill-in forms: “There is no computation, validation or verification of the information you enter and you are still responsible for entering all required information.” Read every field again before you send it.
- It may not do sums. Some forms add up totals with scripts. Work them out yourself and type the result.
Flatten form on download
When the form has fields, the Fill form fields panel shows a Flatten form on download box. Flattening, as the pdf-lib documentation describes it, takes each field’s current appearance and makes it “part of their page’s content stream”, after which “its fields can no longer be accessed or edited”.
Tick it when you are sending a finished form, such as a signed application, and you want your answers to look the same everywhere and not be changed by accident. Leave it off when someone else still has to fill in their part, or when you may want to change an answer later.
Filling a flat form
A flat form is just a picture of a form, or text and lines with no fields behind them. You fill it the way you would fill a printout, by writing on top:
- Text (T). Click an empty spot on a line and type. You can set the font (Helvetica, Times or Courier), size, bold, italic and colour so it sits neatly on the printed line.
- ✓, ✗ and ●. Click inside a printed checkbox. When the editor finds a box around where you clicked, the mark drops into the middle of it. You can change the mark’s colour and size.
- Date (D). Click where the date goes and it places today’s date. Choose the format first: MM/DD/YYYY, “Mon D, YYYY”, YYYY-MM-DD, DD/MM/YYYY or “D Month YYYY”.
- Signature and Initials. Draw it, type your name in a handwriting-style font, or use a photo of your signature on paper. Then place it on the line and resize it. Your initials are kept separately from your full signature.
Anything you place can be moved with the mouse or the arrow keys. If you place something by mistake, press Ctrl+Z (Cmd+Z on a Mac) to undo.
On a scanned form, the whole page is one image, so these tools are the only way in. If you also want the scan’s printed words to be searchable, run it through OCR PDF first.
When the form only says “Please wait…”
Some forms, often from government agencies, open to a single message like this one, quoted from a Nebraska Department of Education help page: “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.”
That message means the form is built with XFA, an XML-based form format from Adobe. XFA forms come in two types. In a static form, “the form’s appearance and layout is fixed”, while a dynamic form can change its appearance, and even add pages, as you fill it in. XFA is not compatible with ordinary PDF forms, it “has been deprecated in PDF 2.0”, and “most PDF processors do not handle XFA content”, including the viewers built into many browsers.
Our editor shows PDFs with Mozilla’s pdf.js, whose XFA rendering is off unless turned on (“Render Xfa forms if any. The default value is false.”), and we leave it off. So:
- A form that is XFA only, the kind that shows “Please wait…”, has no ordinary fields for the editor to show, so you will usually see that same message page and nothing to fill.
- A form that has both XFA and ordinary fields opens with the ordinary fields, and those can be filled. When you change a field, the editor removes the XFA copy of the form on download, because a viewer that reads XFA would otherwise show the old, empty answers.
For an XFA-only form, do what the agency that published it asks. The Nebraska page tells you to save the file to your computer and open the saved copy in Adobe Acrobat Reader, rather than in the browser. The IRS also recommends using Adobe Reader “rather than your web browser” for its PDF files. If the form is needed in a hurry and you can’t install software, ask the agency whether it has a plain PDF or paper version.
Save a copy, then check it
When you are done, press Download PDF. The editor saves a new file and leaves your original untouched, so you can start again if something went wrong.
Before you email or upload the form:
- Open the downloaded copy, not the one in the editor, in a different PDF reader if you have one (your browser’s built-in viewer is fine).
- Check every page. Make sure each answer, tick and date is there and sits inside its box.
- Check the signature. It should be on the right line and not cover printed text.
- If you didn’t flatten, click a filled field to confirm your answer is in the field itself.
By default, nothing you type is kept once you close the tab. The editor can save a draft in this browser only if you switch on autosave, and form answers are left out of that draft unless you also tick “Include images and form answers”. Your signature is stored only if you tick “Remember on this device” when you place it. On a shared or library computer, leave both off.
Signing is a separate question
Placing a drawn or typed signature on a form is an electronic signature, which is fine for most everyday paperwork but not for everything. How to sign a PDF explains what US law says and when ink or a certificate-based digital signature is needed. If you only need to sign, and have no fields to fill, Sign PDF is the quicker tool.