Apple Preview PDF Fixes

The Apple Macintosh Preview program will allow the user to fill in and save a PDF form, with a couple of oddities. If text is entered into a field and the form is saved before the field is closed, either by tabbing or clicking out of the field, the text is not saved. So, be sure to click outside the last field before saving.

If the filled form is opened in Acrobat on Windows, the text entered into fields will not appear unless one clicks into the field. A script that fixes these forms can be found here. In Acrobat Pro X, rather than adding a menu item, I extracted the heart of the script and made it an Action. (Tools --> Action Wizard --> Create New Action --> More Tools --> Execute Java Script --> Options and enter the modified script.) Now when I open a completed form with missing text in the fields, I click the new action to activate it, and a moment later all the text is visible.