Two kinds of PDF form
Forms with boxes were made to be filled on a computer. Click into them in any PDF reader and you can type. When you drop one here, you’ll see “Found 12 boxes to fill” and can type straight into them on the page: text, ticks, round option buttons, dropdowns and lists. Tab moves through them in reading order, across pages.
Printed and scanned forms are just pictures of paper, or pages with lines drawn on them. Many government, bank and school forms in PDF are like this. Normally you’d print them, fill them by hand and scan them back. Here, we look at the page itself and find the places to write:
- lines to write on, solid or dotted (“Name: ________”);
- empty boxes, and boxes with a label in the corner;
- small squares for ticks;
- rows of character boxes, the kind used for a PIN code, a PAN or a date in DD / MM / YYYY.
Each place is named from the words next to it, so you know which is which. On a scan, which has no real words, they’re numbered instead. Anywhere we missed, tap the page to add text or a ✓.
What we leave for you
Some spaces on a form aren’t yours to fill, so we don’t offer them: the signature (that’s Sign PDF’s job), the photo box, and sections marked “for office use” or “for bank use”. On a scan, we can’t read those headings, so office sections may be offered too. Skip them.
Fill my details
Forms ask for the same things again and again: name, email, mobile, date of birth, address, city, state, PIN, country. If you turn on Remember my details on this device, the next form gets a Fill my details button that puts them into the right boxes in one tap.
It only fills empty boxes, tells you how many it filled, and has Undo. It never takes details from boxes about someone else, like “Father’s name” or a nominee. ID numbers like Aadhaar, PAN or passport numbers are never kept. Your details stay in this browser, on this device, and you can see, change or forget them in My Pocket.
On a phone
Tap a box and a large editor opens above the keyboard, so you can see what you’re typing. Next moves to the following box. Small boxes are hard to hit with a finger, so a tap just beside one goes to the nearest box.
Saving
Press Save filled form to download a copy named like application-filled.pdf. The note says how many answers were saved. Under More options:
- Size of the text you add on the page: S, M or L;
- Lock answers so they can’t be changed makes the answers part of the page. Use it when you’re sending the form to someone who shouldn’t edit it.
Things it can’t do yet
Some old forms made for Adobe Reader only (XFA forms) don’t open properly in other apps. For those, tap the page to type where you need to. Forms also take Latin letters only for now, so Hindi or Tamil text won’t show. For a form that needs signing, press Sign PDF on the result screen and the filled form opens there.
Checked against the tool on 22 October 2026. How we write and test these guides