Forms, stamps and overlays

Boxes a reader fills in on screen, and your text laid over stationery somebody else already printed.

A form is a document with boxes in it: a name, a date, a box to tick, a choice from a list, a place to sign. The reader fills them in on screen and sends the file back, and what they entered comes back as data rather than as handwriting somebody has to decipher.

An overlay is the same idea the other way round: your text laid onto a sheet that already exists — headed paper a printing works produced, a contract a customer supplied, a form from an administration. The original is not redrawn and not altered. It is placed underneath, exactly as it was.

What it saves you

What the reader types comes back as data
Nothing is transcribed, nothing is illegible, and nobody has to retype a returned form into the system that was going to hold it anyway.
Your headed paper is used exactly as it is
There is no need to rebuild a design somebody else made and no risk of rebuilding it slightly wrong: the invoice is laid on the letterhead that already exists.
A stamp that says what state the document is in
Draft, cancelled, paid — set across the page at a size nobody can overlook, so an old copy is not mistaken for a live one.

See it done

Every one of these is a real PDF this library wrote, with the source that wrote it.

A pack built on three supplied sheets

A supply agreement standing on three PDF files the customer sent: a headed sheet under the front page, a plain sheet under every page the schedule runs to, and a page of conditions that goes in whole.

The evaluation watermark

What an unlicensed copy looks like: the evaluation watermark the library stamps on every page.

An interactive form

A form a reader fills in: text boxes, a check box, a drop-down, radio buttons.

An archivable PDF/A-3 form

A form that is also a PDF/A-3 file: every field already drawn, with a visible frame, expecting nothing from the reader's software.