Brain Drippings

As summer is fast approaching we find ourselves with a  lot of ‘download this, fill it in, and fax it to us’ forms to fill out. Permission forms, waivers of liability, membership forms, &c. the usual detritus of scheduling activities for the kids over the long break. The trouble is, almost all of these are PDFs that are not setup as PDF forms, so we have to physically print them and physically fill them out, and physically put them in a fax machine (19th Century technology still hanging on by a thread in the 21st Century!), and send them off.

Or do we?  I have a computer, and I’m not afraid to use it.  Here’s what I do.

First off, I open up Pages (but this will work in Open Office or maybe even Microsoft Office) and I drag in the PDF ‘form’ in, essentially making it a background image to my page. I set it to 100% size and I make it fit the page. Then, I create text boxes for each field. I have to turn off wrap-around (“Object causes wrap” in the Pages inspector), but that’s about it.  I position each field right where it needs to go, and then I print the form to a PDF, all filled out.  I even have a screen capture of my signature saved on my computer (stored on an encrpted disk image) that I can put in, so no paper ever needs be involved. I can then fax the form, or if I whine enough, I can usually get a email address to send the form in via email. No muss, no fuss, no phonelines, no paper. As an added bonus, I have a copy of the permission form or application on my computer and I can go back to it anytime I need to (like last summer when one day-camp lost the liability waiver and idn’t tell me until I was dropping the kid off. I begged a couple of minute son the computer and printed it off right there).

On the other hand, I could just learn to write legibly, but that doesn’t seem very likely.