How to Turn a Paper Form to a Webform in Under 5 Minutes

Forms and document modernization is a topic that is as old as the creation of digital mediums. Nonetheless, it remains a relevant challenge for many organizations.

Part of the challenges involves dealing with legacy formats. Formats such as Word and PDF documents can offer an excellent starting point for document modernization but those source documents may not always be available.

Scanning documents to PDFs with Adobe Scan

Regardless of our starting point, Adobe offers tools to deal with these challenges. Starting with Adobe Scan, we can take paper-based documents and forms and digitize them by scanning and saving them as PDF documents. This allows us to use a mobile device to quickly create a PDF document from a simple printed form.

Using page recognition features, Adobe Scan has no issue digitizing documents and cropping pages automatically. By saving those PDF documents to the Adobe Cloud, they can be used across other applications such as Adobe Acrobat.

PDF Optical Character Recognition (OCR) with Adobe Acrobat

As you may already know, not all PDFs are created equal. Scanned PDF documents normally do not contain any information other than the image used to create them. By using Acrobat’s OCR features, we can extract the text present within the document to augment the information available within the document. To do so, follow these steps:

1. Open a scanned PDF document using Adobe Acrobat
2. Use the Scan & OCR tool available from the right-hand toolbar. Use the More Tools option if the Scan & OCR tool is not visible.
3. Use the Recognize Text option of the tool to perform text recognition and augment the current document with a text layer.
4. Save the resulting document

PDF Form Creation with Adobe Acrobat

Next, we want to transform our PDF into a PDF Form. Once again Acrobat can help us achieve this by using the Prepare Form tool. By enabling field recognition, Acrobat uses the power of machine learning and AI to detect fields within the current document and is even smart enough to automatically apply field labels. To do so, follow these steps:

1. Open a scanned PDF document using Adobe Acrobat
2. Use the Prepare Form tool available from the right-hand toolbar. Use the More Tools option if the Prepare Form tool is not visible.
3. Select whether or not this document requires signatures. Enabling the option will allow Adobe Acrobat to place Acrobat Sign text tags within the document where signatures are detected which would allow signatures to be captured electronically
4. Ensure that the Form field auto-detection option is ON
5. Click that Start button to perform recognition
6. Review the detected fields and use Acrobat to edit any of the fields that need adjustments
7. Save the resulting document. You now have a simple static PDF form!

To find out more about what we can do to help streamline your modernization process, reach out to our team for a free consultation.