Sad state of PDF Forms on the Mac

While trying to fill out a voter registration form, I ran into this sad state of affairs:

  1. Preview works with the check boxes and radio buttons, but the text fields are only 2 characters wide.
  2. SmileOnMyMac’s PDFpen application doesn’t work at all. Radio buttons are displayed randomly on the page, the text fields are not editable at all.
  3. Adobe’s own reader works for editing, but they don’t let you save the document! To make matters even more insulting, they have gone out of their way to disable OS X’s “Save as PDF” from the Print Dialog! So you get this comical, yet infuriating sequence:

    3a. “You cannot save this form, instead print it for your records”

    3b. “Save as PDF has been disabled. Use File->Save instead”

ROFL. Stupid Adobe. Another company going down in flames, just like Microsoft, slowly but surely. Maybe this is some maneuver to push people to buy their distiller product or some other software?

Edit:

Found this hack on the Apple forums:

Adobe Reader and Preview can’t save filled-in PDFs, only print them. You can install CUPS-PDF http://www.codepoetry.net/projects/cups-pdf-for-mosx to create a virtual printer. When you print to that printer, it will create a PDF file of the filled-in form