Formulate Pro — Filling Things Out
Today I wanted to talk about a little program that you might not need to use very often, but when you need it it is worth its weight in gold. Did you ever have to fill out forms? Most of the time they come as PDF, but sometimes it is just a plain image. There are a few tools out there that allow you to fill out forms. Some of them cost a bit like PDFpen, PDFClerk or PDF Studio. Other really are costly, like Adobe's Acrobat. But for people like you and me, that occasionally need to fill out a form these are not really reasonable. Formulate Pro to the rescue! It does a lot of what the pricier tools do, but for free. In fact, it is even open source.
Overview
The interface could not be simpler. You open your PDF document and use one of the six possible markup tools. You can write text, place check-marks, draw a freeform line, circles and rectangles and place images. That is enough to fill out pretty much anything. In fact I never used anything else then text, check-marks and images yet.
There are a few things that are a bit annoying. Sometimes, in fact most of the time, text disappears when you press enter. You then have to switch to the arrow tool and select it again to make it visible. No deal breaker, but a bit annoying.
The other thing is that you cannot import plain image forms to fill out. To get them into Formulate Pro you have to open the image in Preview and "print" it as PDF. Similar thing goes for export. Formulate does not save as PDf, but in its own .formulate format. To get a usable document out, you again have to use the print dialog to save it as PDF.
All not truly bad, but not as easy as a one click solution. But it is open source and if it annoys you enough, feel free to contribute to the project by coding the missing things.
Summary
Formulate Pro is an excellent solution for people that need to occasionally fill out forms. IT is free and works well. It is being developed by Andrew de los Reyes and can be found on Google Code.
Pros
- Open Source
- does what it is supposed to do, but not more
- fast and intuitive
Contras
- text sometimes disappears
- does not import images
- doesn't save to PDF directly
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