Preview vs Adobe Reader

[Buadhai]

My wife is an attorney who frequently has to fill out government produced PDFs. She has always preferred Adobe Reader for this task. Lately, I've been encouraging her to use Preview. However, she now has me stumped. She wants to be able to change the typeface (font) and size of text in fillable fields. She can fill and edit those fields, but can't change the appearance.

This is the PDF in Adobe Reader. Note that the typeface and size in the fillable fields are about the same as the rest of the document.

Above is the document in Preview. Note the size of the Thai text in the fillable fields is much larger than the rest of the document.

Is it possible to adjust the typeface and text size in fillable fields in Preview or is she stuck with Adobe Reader?

 

[Buadhai]

It turns out that there are two possible solutions.

• Type the text you want in the PDF fillable field into Text Edit or some other text app and use that app to adjust the size of the text. This requires some trial and error. Then copy the text and paste it into the fillable field. Unfortunately, sometimes text pasted in this way will not be centered in the text box. So, try....

• Instead of typing in the fillable field, create a text box in Preview, type or paste the text into the text box and then drag the text box to overlay the fillable field.

I hate that this is a major kludge, but it does work in fillable forms that won't cooperate with Preview.

 

[stephenschimpf]

I don't know if this is at all related, but I've been using Preview for years (since I switched to an Apple computer), and this year I noticed that fields in my W2 filled out by my employer had the wrong text font and the text was much bigger than it should have been. I checked the forms for previous years and they were screwed up for at least the last few years.

I went ahead and installed Adobe Reader and the forms look just fine. I kept Adobe Reader on my computer and am using it now as my default PDF viewer since I trust it more than Preview to show forms correctly.

 

[Buadhai]

I don't know if this is at all related,

Definitely related.