How to fix PDF Form With Blank Fields

This weekend I had the opportunity to discover a PDF form which wasn’t displaying properly in Adobe Reader.

Upon further investigation I found out that the cause of the problem was Preview.app on OSX. Preview edits forms but corrupts them when saving so that the fields appear blank in Adobe Reader. The data is still there, but it’s not visible.

You saved a form in Preview. It's not your fault, you didn't know better. — You saved a form in Preview. It’s not your fault, you didn’t know better.

Now the form looks blank. Don't worry though, we're about to get it back. — Now the form looks blank in Adobe Reader. Don’t worry though, we’re about to get it back.

The first script I found requires Adobe Acrobat, but doesn’t work with Reader. Eventually I found this website with a solution for Adobe Reader. Fix blank fields in forms corrupted by OSX Preview.

Copy the Fix Field Appearances Script found here. Paste it into TextEdit and then convert to Plain Text (Format -> Make Plain Text).

Or just download it here.

Now we need to create the destination folder and copy it.

On OSX it needs to go in: /Users/YourUserName/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Acrobat/11.0/JavaScripts

On Windows it needs to go in: C:\Users\George\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Acrobat\11.0\JavaScripts

You will need to create the JavaScripts directory.

To get to this directory on OSX:

Use the Finder's Go to Folder menu — Use the Finder’s Go to Folder menu

Navigate from there to Application Support/Adobe/Acrobat/11.0 (or whatever version you’re using) and create a folder named JavaScripts. Name may be case-sensitive, and don’t forget the trailing s. Copy the fix_forms.js script into the JavaScripts directory.

Lastly we need to enable menu items JavaScript execution privileges in Adobe Reader (in the Adobe Reader -> Preferences menu)