Forms

How to convert a PDF into a web form

By
Jordan Hall

What’s wrong with PDF forms?

PDF has ruled the forms world for nearly 30 years which is a testament to the versatility and interoperability of the standard that Adobe created in 1992. There are two flavors of PDF forms – AcroForms and XFA forms which are not compatible with eachother.

AcroForms were released as part of PDF 1.2 in 1996 and essentially involve adding form fields as an overlay on top of the image of a form. While AcroForms can be rendered in the browser or on mobile devices, the user experience leaves a lot to be desired. Many users experience issues opening, filling, or saving AcroForms within a browsers native PDF viewer, and the issues become more egregious on mobile devices where users have ‘pinch and zoom’ to navigate filling the form.

XFA forms came from Adobe’s acquisition of Jetform technology and were released with PDF 1.5 and Acrobat 6 in 2003. These forms require Acrobat 7 or later to be opened and are not accessible in the browser or on mobile. Many organizations are stuck with heaps of unsupported XFA forms that they can’t migrate away from.

Converting PDF Forms with Morf

Morf will convert your PDF forms into embeddable HTML 5 forms in a few simple steps. Once your form has been converted you can embed it anywhere with a simple HTML snippet.

Jump over to our editor

Go to https://editor.getmorf.io – you don’t need to sign up or create an account to convert your forms.

Select Convert +

Select ‘Convert’ from the menu at the top of the page

Choose your file

Select the PDF you want to convert.

Note that XFA Form conversion is on our roadmap in the near future and we will announce to all of our users and followers the second it is live.

‘Morf it’

???You now have a responsive web form. ???

High Five! Now do it again.

We built Morf to overcome the scale of modernizing digital forms. Convert all of your PDFs to web forms quickly and easily, and start embedding them in your apps, sites, and systems.

Ready to get started?
Generate and embed forms anywhere.
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