How to edit data that was entered into a PDF form and then saved?

An enabled form should be fillable forever. But there are sometimes problems. A PDF is enabled with rights for very specific things, such as filling the form, signing, and saving. If a PDF is somehow changed in a way that violates the applied rights, then the rights are invalidated. Ideally Acrobat shouldn't allow changes that cause validation, but there are holes in the protection. Do you know if there are any scripts on the form that make changes or if the form was touched by another tool, or anything like this?

There is another problem with rights that may be a more likely scenario. Adobe changed the rights mechanism slightly between versions of Acrobat. Back when Acrobat 9 came out there were a lot of complaints about similar issues. A form created and enabled in Acrobat 9, and then used in Reader 7 or 8 would become invalid. And visa-versa, forms created and enabled in earlier versions would invalidate when used in Reader 9.

Do a search on this web site, you should find the forum threads. I don't think there was any real resolution except to upgrade.

Yes, and the main answer/tip was to always use an enabled-PDF with the same Reader version.

;-)

Thanks for the information. I used Adobe Pro 9 to create the form. I will check and see what version of Reader that she used.

Found out that she was using Adobe Reader 7. Guess that was the problem. Have told all instructors that to use the form, they need Adobe Reader 9 or higher.

Thanks again.

I recently ran into this problem in filling out a pdf form for an adoption grant. This was a multipage document with a very large number of fields to be entered. My wife had filled out most of it and saved it. I filled out some of my parts and also saved it. The document had remained open even though it was saved a couple of times. The document was then closed. Later on re-opening it to finish it, the document was no longer editable. We had to start from scratch with a new copy of the document and fill it all in again, cutting and pasting where we could (from some backup text files I had created which contained some, but far from all, of what was in the original document). Needless to say, my wife was not a happy camper.

I am not certain which version of Reader we were using (7 or 8 I think), and I have no way to know what Acrobat version created the file. I cannot say if the version differences, if any, were at the root of the problem.

This was a very frustrating experience. Even though I am a big fan of the pdf format, this is something that would have been much better accomplished if this had been a Word (or similar) document.