
Ask HN: Why are there no good file formats for digital forms? - oftenwrong
Recently, I have been receiving and returning a lot of forms via email. When I say &quot;forms&quot;, I mean the paper-style digital forms bureaucratic organisations seem to love. Typically these are in a PDF format. Overall, filling these forms has been a painful experience. It seems that there are significant issues with the creation and compatibility of popular formats. Filling out these forms digitally is never straightforward. It is almost always easier to print them, fill them out by hand with a pen, and then scan them back in.<p>By contrast, form-filling on the web is not so bad. Web forms are simple to use, ubiquitous, relatively accessible, and rarely have major compatibility issues. Many forms can even be auto-filled with varying success. Most of us would agree that forms are more-or-less a &quot;solved problem&quot; on the web.<p>The main barrier to the usage web forms is that they need to be hosted on a website. Large, bureaucratic organisations seem to struggle with building websites and technology in general. These organisations prefer to treat their digital forms as if they are paper forms. You download the form, or receive it via email, and then you return a filled copy. The filled copy is read by human eyes, and the information is entered into &quot;the system&quot; with human fingers.<p>Why is there no web-technology-based file format for digital forms? The form can be typical HTML, CSS, and maybe even JS. Instead of hitting &quot;Submit&quot; and POSTing the form payload to a server, the user could hit &quot;Save&quot; and the file itself would be altered to contain the form payload. This concept would allow much of the existing web tech we use for forms to be re-used, and would allow organisations to build automation around their forms in a piecemeal fashion.<p>What do you think?
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oftenwrong
For fun, here are some of the bad form-filling experiences I have had
recently:

1\. Received PDF via email. The file was designed to be filled digitally (it
had actual fillable fields). However, none of the PDF readers I tried could
fill all of the fields. Some of the fields were broken/missing. It is possible
the file was created incorrectly, or that my PDF software was not-entirely-
compatible with the form. I had to insert a text overlay to fill in the broken
fields.

2\. Received a PDF file via email. It did not have fillable fields at all - it
was like a raw scan. I could only fill it digitally by manually overlaying
text, which would have been a pain. I decided to print-fill-scan instead.

3\. Received a Microsoft Word document (.doc) file via email. No actual
fillable fields - just sections created with underlined space characters. I
didn't want to print-and-scan, so I "overtyped" in these sections to replace
the space characters with my entries. Where check marks were required, I
pasted a check mark character in. One field required me to circle an option,
so I had to use a shape overlay.

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shanecleveland
My job requires me to both create and provide PDF order forms and receive,
complete and return many forms.

Our healthcare-related clientele is both slow to adopt technology and,
understandably, still have a need to print and complete forms by hand – at
least partially – because of the settings they find themselves in. We still
get a ton of faxed in! So we can't exclusively create web-based forms. But I
have used Adobe Acrobat Pro to make them fillable digitally. It works well the
majority of the time, but it is not without fail. In fact, it has gotten worse
since many browsers open a link to a PDF in the browser window. They don't
tend to have full compatibility with all form fields and many people don't
realize they are looking at a PDF, but thing it is a "web form."

On the other side, I have always looked to streamline completing redundant
forms as much as possible. I have gone as far as emulating, as you suggest, in
HTML, CS and JS. It's a bit of a side project, as well: businessformsplus.org.

It offers the familiarity of a paper form or PDF and allows printing to use
the final product as needed. And most have a feature to allow saving/caching
info that may remain unchanged from form to form.

Do some searching on HN or the web for PDF APIs. There are some really nice
ones that allow you to upload a scan of a paper form and create a digital
version with fillable fields either directly or through API. Some allow you to
build forms from scratch or utilize a more traditional web form to later fill
out the PDF form.

In my personal life, the beginning of the school year is torturous with the
paper forms that have to be filled out for each child, even though you did the
same thing the year before and the majority of the information is the same for
each child (household info, emergency contacts, etc.) Getting schools to adopt
would be the hard part, but offering up a service that would carry information
over from previous years and share between siblings would be huge!

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zzo38computer
It is a feature I wanted to have in a web browser; the ability to save form
data to a local file (and to be able to refill a form with the saved data from
a selected file). (This might be possible with an extension. I wanted it for a
different purpose, although the purpose you give is also a use of the same
function.)

