PDF for Online Forms

How to make one PDF for an online application

1. Add your documents in the order the form wants them: photos of certificates (or take them with the camera) and any PDFs, such as an e-Aadhaar or a marks memo. Move them up or down; you see every page as it will come out.
2. Check the choices. The usual ones are set: every page on A4, sideways pages upright, the photos' paper made white, and under 200 KB. Change the size to what your form allows: 100 KB, 300 KB, 1 MB or a size you type.
3. Tap Make the PDF, look at the checks and the first page, then download or share it.

Everything happens on your phone or computer: nothing is uploaded to ap7am or anywhere else. On a phone the three steps come one after another; on a computer they are on one screen.

What it does to your pages

• Upright: in a PDF, a page whose text runs sideways or upside down is turned so it reads the right way (the tool reads which way the letters run). A photo is drawn upright the way your camera says it was held. Any page can be turned with ↻, and left out with ✕.
• A4: a page that is already A4 stays exactly as it is. A larger or smaller page (Letter, Legal, A5, a scan of another size) is scaled as a whole onto A4, never stretched, its text still text. Something small, such as an ID card, is centred on the page at its own size rather than blown up. Each photo goes on an A4 page, upright or sideways by its shape. Choose "As they are" to keep PDF pages their own size.
• Colours: leave them, or make the PDF grey or black and white when a form asks for that.
• Blank pages: when you ask, empty pages in the PDFs (the backs of scanned sheets) are marked and left out; you see them and can keep any.
• Photos: the paper is made white and the writing dark, as JPG to PDF does; stamps and photos keep their colour.
• Size: if the PDF is over the limit, it is made smaller the way Compress PDF does: first the pictures in it are made lighter while text stays sharp and searchable; only if that is not enough are the pages saved as pictures, and the result says so. It is never made smaller than it needs to be. The limit counts as portals do, so a file under 200 KB is under it whether the portal counts a KB as 1,000 or 1,024 bytes.

The result shows what was checked in the file made: every page A4, the number of pages, no page with sideways text, its size against the limit, and no password. If it cannot get under the limit, it says what to try: fewer pages, black and white, or a larger limit if the form allows one.

What it cannot do

• It cannot tell which way a photo or a scan with no text should stand beyond what the camera recorded: look at the pages and turn any that are wrong.
• Fillable boxes keep what they show but can no longer be filled in, and links to other pages stop working; on a page put onto A4, links of every kind become part of the page.
• It does not know each portal's rules: check the notification for the size, the number of pages and the format.

Questions

Related: Merge PDF to join files without changing them, Resize PDF to A4, Compress PDF, Black and White PDF.

Made with pdf-lib (MIT licence) and Mozilla's pdf.js (Apache 2.0 licence), both running in your browser.