We have been using Adobe Acrobat Professional with Adobe LiveCycle Designer to create the downloadable application forms for where I work. We have been having troubles with one of the forms not submitting, so I had a look at it today and fixed it, but then had a closer look at how the forms work on the Mac.
Adobe PDF files by default on a Mac are opened up in Mac Preview. It’s nice because Preview is very fast to load, and it is integrated well with Safari.
Unfortunately even after I fixed the PDF form to submit on a PC, the PDF form still would not submit on the Mac. When I clicked on the “Submit by Email” button nothing happened. It didn’t give an error, but it just didn’t submit the form.
This is probably giving us all sorts of problems that we don’t ever hear about and that our potential applicants don’t even know about. They probably wonder why we never get in contact with them in regards to their application, which they thought they had submitted, and we never get their application form.
The only way that I have found for users to submit the PDF forms is if they actually open the PDF in Adobe Acrobat Reader. Downloading and loading Adobe Acrobat Reader for the Mac is free and easy, you can do it from here.
You will need to set-up your Mac to open the PDF files in Adobe Acrobat, instead of in Mac Preview. You can do that by following these steps:
- “Get Info” for any PDF file
- Change the “Open With” settings from Preview to Adobe Acrobat
- Click “Change All…” to apply the changes to all PDF files
If you want more details on it then check out thinair, which is where I got a lot of the above information.
With a problem like this it is definitely time for us to find a new way to do our school application process. We are currently developing a new web-site using Joomla, so we are planning in the next six-months to develop an on-line school registration module. That should help prevent problems like the PDF form submission problems in the Mac.
When we produce out PDF forms we use a system similar to what is described at David Airey – How to create interactive PDF forms.
Technorati Tags: adobe acrobat, pdf form clomid perth submission problems, pdf forms in mac preview
Hello webmaster
I would like to share with you a link to your site
write me here preonrelt@mail.ru
so happy i found this! we just rolled out a form submission system, and found that Mac users couldn’t use it. i was about ready to start panicking… thanks!