Gotchas Date, Number and Other Form Elements Make sure you change the font to something like Arial or Times New Roman which are both available on 97% of devices. Be sure to also make the font size appropriately small enough otherwise it will get cut off when it is input. You then need to adjust its properties to horizontal align left, vertical-align top and text wrap instead of inline. This is easy to get around by stretching a text input control long and wide enough. By this I mean the equivalent of an HTML text area - a text input that can accept text downwards and across, i.e.

The cells are flush to horizontal cells but there is a small gap between rows.

Cells need to be uniform width and height

Resizing any cells means redoing the entire table.

There are a few caveats with this approach: Finally, I copy and pasted this row as many times as I needed rows. I then copied this cell n - 1 times to match the number of columns. In my case left aligned and vertical-align top worked the best. Adjust the alignment to whatever makes sense to you. I also set the text to be wrap instead of inline so that text is not cut off and goes to the next line in the cell. I then copied one of these “cells” and pasted.įor the none header rows I modified a header cell to not be read-only, took out the default text and adjusted the text size smaller and made the text regular. The header of the table was read-only bold text. What did work fairly well for me was gluing together input controls. Using the above workaround for text does not work as you cannot make the text box size match that of the cells. For example for a checkbox insert a checkbox with no label.

For some elements, a workaround is to insert them into the cells of the table. Form labels seem to get the form controls to better anchor in their position.

The main situation a label is useful is when your form controls keep moving when you save the file, close it and open it again. Instead, simply use normal none-form text and place other form elements like inputs next to the text that it is associated with. This becomes tedious as you can only edit the text of a label by double-clicking it. There is no need to add labels to the form. This was especially effective at getting text boxes to align well with labels. One thing that seemed to tame this behaviour a bit was using labels instead of normal text. Perhaps placing elements in a table with invisible borders could be one way to work around this. There does not seem to be any way to get this to stop. I also found it infuriating how some elements keep moving between saves. This is easy to get around by getting one correct and then copy-pasting for any new elements you need. In Libre Writer each element you add defaults with a black background and the default Writer font (Fira Sands). Alternatively, you can also right-click a form control and choose Control Properties. To edit things like font and background colour double click the new element. When you are ready to convert the document to a PDF simply click the icon that looks like the Adobe Icon. You can unclick this option to see what the form looks like.To start editing forms you will need to click the Design Mode To start working with form elements in Writer and Calc: Writer also lets you control how these form controls are anchored. Writer lets me easily position controls and assign labels. Word kept giving me weird VB Macro errors and it would not let me easily position form controls.

I found this easier to achieve in LibreOffice Writer than MS Word. Luckily LibreOffice Writer can do this very easily. On Word on Windows, you can do this by enabling developer tools in the ribbon and using the form options under there.īut my workstation has been set up with Ubuntu. Today I had to convert a Word document into a fillable PDF.

Edit pdf fillable form in libreoffice