On Wed, 1 May 2019 11:38:40 -0000 (UTC), Dan Purgert wrote:

Sounds like this "form" is intended to be printed and then filled out,
either by hand or with a typewriter.

Hi Dan,
Yes, you are correct. It's a multipage color form of rather complex images
and formatting, similar to the forms that Paul linked to, where we had to
fill in the underlined blanks, check boxes, initialize, date, & sign.

Irfanview freeware can't do it since the fonts are nowhere near as
adaptable as you need them to be, but, Paint.NET does it well given the
selectable fonts that you can place & modify as needed to get the placement
just perfect.

The selectable fonts came in handy, for example, with the signature and the
initialization of the various checkboxes, where the various sizable script
fonts looked exactly like initials and signatures.

The main issue with the solution that I came up with using existing tools
was simply this:
o It should require only a single free tool, not four free tools
o It should preserve the PDF (not turn it into an image)
o It should preserve the multiple pages (not force me to concatenate)

I would think this need that I had is a general need for everyone.

If the party creating the form intended it to be editable directly as a
PDF, the person filling in said form would've been able to do so
directly in acrobat reader / whatever the web-browser plugin is called.

It was meant to be printed, filled out, initialized, signed, and dated, and
then sent by snail mail back to the department that issued the form.

We could have printed it but there were reasons we didn't, not the least of
which was the person who needed it pronto didn't have time to find a
24-hour color printer as it was needed in real time and it was after
bedtime, and even then, they needed a scanner, which they didn't have, etc.

So it was simpler to just edit the PDF, which they knew I could do.

Remember, I didn't have any problem doing exactly what we needed except for
these four problems, which this thread is hoping others can help eliminate,
which would benefit us all in the process:
o It took 4 tools (a PDF concatenator, Irfanview, Ghostscript, Paint.NET)
o It turned into a single page TIF (instead of remaining as a PDF file)
o It had to be done page by page & then concatenated back together

For example, my city does this with their income tax form. Fill in the
fields (employer, income, taxes paid to other cities, etc.), print out
the completed document, and the sign the bottom.

Yes. I do that all the time. We used to fax such things in the olden days.
But this didn't lend itself to printing because the person requesting it
had no printer nor scanner and it was evening, and yesterday was the
deadline.

Even so, we all would benefit from the ability to edit PDFs.

In my experience, trying to work-around this on a PC (as with your
options that were snipped) tends to have various (and usually
debilitating in the long run) shortcomings in the "user friendliness"
department.

Actually, it was trivial to do, even down to the initials & signature.

I'm simply allergic to solutions that require multiple tools where the end
result was multiple pages of an image-to-PDF instead of a multi-page single
PDF-to-PDF.

My only goal with this thread is to find a way to _improve_ this process.
o Everyone benefits if someone knows of a good free PDF editor solution

If the form is something widely and regularly used (e.g. tax forms,
etc), perhaps the best option is asking the party who generated it if
they can also create an editable option.

This was an institutional professionally created complex multi-page color
form, where there is zero chance of getting the party who generated it to
do anything.

The request at this point isn't to solve the initial problem anyway, as I
easily solved the problem using these simple steps:
o View the form in any freeware PDF reader
o Convert the PDF to a multipage TIF with freeware Irfanview + Ghostscript
o Edit each page of the multipage TIF with freeware Paint.NET (or similar)
o Convert the single pages of TIF with freeeware Irfanview + Ghostscript
o Concatenate the single pages into a multipage PDF with Acrobat Writer (or similar)

At this point, the request is to figure out if anyone has a better process
than what I had on hand using Windows freeware that solves this problem:
1. Start with a multipage color PDF & edit it using only freeware