Fill a PDF
The form somebody still has to sign.
Place your questions onto the actual page, once. Every response after that comes back as a filled document, named the way your filing expects.
The problem
The county does not accept a spreadsheet.
Half of this work ends at a PDF somebody made in 2011 — a page with boxes in fixed places that has to arrive looking like itself. So the answers get typed in twice: once by the person filling your form, once by whoever copies them across.
Put each answer where it goes.
Open the PDF, drag a question onto the spot it belongs, set the size. That is the template — it is positions on a page, which is why it works on a scan that has no form fields in it at all.
Anywhere on the page
A placement is a page number and a position. Nothing has to be a real PDF field, so a photocopy of a photocopy works the same as a clean export.
Type that fits the box
Size and font per placement, with long answers wrapped inside the width you gave them rather than running off the edge.
Ticks and boxes
A checkbox answer draws a mark instead of the word "true", which is what the page was expecting.
Only when it applies
A placement can carry a condition, so the guardian section stays empty on an adult’s copy instead of printing "N/A" down the page.
It comes back filled.
The response arrives as a page you could hand over — attached to the submission it came from, so the answers and the document never drift apart.
On the response
The filled file is recorded on the submission and shows as a column in Results, next to the answers that made it.
Named your way
Build the filename out of the answers themselves — a surname, a programme, the date it arrived — so a folder of them sorts without being renamed.
Dates that read as dates
Drop today’s date, or the submission’s, into the name in the format your filing uses rather than an ISO timestamp.
Open it where you are
The column opens the document in the viewer, so checking one does not mean downloading it first.
Filling it is a step, not a chore.
Fill a PDF is an action a workflow can take — so the document can be made the moment a response arrives, after an approval, or only for the answers that need one.
On arrival
A submission triggers the run and the document exists before anybody has opened the response.
After the decision
Put it behind an approval step and only the accepted ones become paperwork.
More than one template
Different answers, different forms: a workflow can branch and fill whichever page that person’s case actually needs.
The same builder
Templates live with the form, so the person who wrote the questions is the person who places them — no handover.
What it connects to.
Filling a page is one step of the paperwork. These are the others.
Stop typing it in twice. Place it once.
Map the questions onto the page you already have to send, and let every response after that fill itself.