What do you need to fill in?Any PDF form.

Where does the file go?Nowhere. It stays in this tab.

Free, no sign-up. Works on a plane once installed.

As printedWhat it foundFilled in

Type on it, sign it, send the same file back

FormworkPDF opens a PDF and gives you the fields it has. Where the form has none, on a scan, a print-out, something typeset in 1954, it reads the page and works out where the blanks are, then treats them exactly like real fields.

Sign it by drawing, typing, or photographing your signature on paper. Rotate, delete, reorder and append pages, so a photo of your ID becomes page seven. Shrink the result when a portal says 2 MB and your scan is nine. Then export, flattened, rebuilt from the bytes you opened.

Forms with no fields are read, not guessed at

Two shapes cover almost every printed form. Here they are at the size they appear on a page, with the slot the detector settles on marked in pen.

A rule

A solid line with room to write above it. The rejections are what make it work: ink sitting on the line is underlined text, and another rule 18 points away is a table.

A leader

The row of dots printed forms have marked a blank with for a century. A machine set it, so the dots are evenly spaced and the same size — which is what stops the last line of every paragraph reading as a blank.

A boxed cell

Faint column lines break up in a scan, but the point where a horizontal rule stops does not. Those endpoints are the column edges, and a pair of them crossed by two rules is a cell.

The file is read and rewritten in the tab you opened it in

Not encrypted in transit. Not deleted after an hour. Not uploaded. Your tax return, your medical intake form and your signature are handled by the browser you are already looking at — and a page that has never sent them anywhere cannot leak them, be breached, or change its mind in a later privacy policy.

Nothing leavesthis tab

Measured, not claimed

Geometry is instant and free and finds about six fields in seven. A trained detector finds nineteen in twenty and reads tick boxes, but it is a download measured in tens of megabytes. Neither is right for everyone, so FormworkPDF asks before each scan — and shows you this.

	Fast	Accurate	Best
Text fields found	86%	93%	96%
Tick boxes found	52%	95%	100%
False positives	459	28	44
Per page	0.3 s	~3 s	~10 s
Download, once	nothing	37 MB	97 MB
Works offline	always	after the first time	after the first time

Scored over 41 published forms, nothing generated and nothing flattened to manufacture an answer key. How that is scored.

Deliberately not here

No server: Detection and reading both turned out to fit in the browser, so the thing a backend was meant to be for stopped existing. Nothing in the core flow has anywhere to upload to.
No account: Download my data writes one readable JSON file with your details, signature and saved answers. Importing it merges rather than replaces. That is the whole of the sync story, and it never contains a PDF.
No stored document, unless you ask: Your details, your signature and the answers you typed are kept, keyed by a hash of the file, so reopening the same PDF offers them back. The PDF itself is only kept if you switch on Keep the PDF too, which is off until you say otherwise.
One request, ever: The trained detector is fetched once from a public CDN and cached, ready for when you scan a form that has no fields. That request carries no document and no identifier, and you can turn it off.

Questions, answered before you open anything

How do you fill out a PDF that is not fillable?: A non-fillable PDF has no form fields, so text has to be placed onto the page. FormworkPDF reads the printed page, works out where the blanks are from rules, dotted leaders and boxed cells, and turns them into boxes you type into. Filling a form with no fields.
How do you type on a scanned PDF?: A scan is an image, so there is nothing to click and nothing to select. The page is rendered, thresholded against a local average, and searched for blanks; the printed labels are read so the fields have names. Typing on a scan.
Can you sign a PDF without uploading it?: Yes. Draw it, type it in a handwriting face, or photograph your signature on paper. It is embedded into the exported file on your device, and flattened so it cannot be dragged off. Signing without an upload.
What does flattening a PDF do?: It merges form fields, signatures and annotations into the page content, so the answers become part of the printed page and cannot be edited. It is also what stops a filled form arriving blank in somebody else’s reader. Flattening.
How do you get a PDF under a 2 MB upload limit?: By re-rendering the pages as JPEGs at a resolution chosen to hit the target. Flatten first: rasterising disables annotations, and an unflattened form keeps its answers there, so the output is the right size and empty. Hitting an upload limit.
Is there a PDF editor that does not upload your file?: This one. Rendering, detection, OCR, filling and export all run in the tab. There is one optional network request in the product — the detector weights — and it carries no document and no identifier. Why there is no server.

Notes

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