Hiding the "You cannot save data typed into this form" message in Acrobat

Question

I am embeding a PDF form on my web application. The application allows you to fill in the fields in the form, and when you are done, click on a "Submit" button, which saves whatever you've entered into the form. This functionality is working fine.

Unfortunately, Adobe Reader displays a message on top of their embeded control that says: "Please fill out the following form. You cannot save data typed into this form. Please print your completed form if you would like a copy for your records."

Now, I know what Adobe Reader is trying to tell the user. Basically, Adobe Reader will not allow you to save the contents of what you've entered into your local hard drive as a new PDF.

However, since we've added a Submit button which effectively will save what they typed within our application, and it is working. Therefore, we think this message is misleading, and would like to remove it.

I use iTextSharp in .Net for our form automation server side. I have not found a way to remove this message from the embeded forms.

Any help?

Answer 1

I'm pretty sure that there is no way around this if you want to continue to use Acrobat Reader to display the PDF. This message is built into Acrobat Reader, and I am not aware of any way to override it from the outside.

Sorry, this is more in the way of a negative answer than a positive one.

There are some third-party, free, projects that are basically PDF viewers for .NET. This would allow you to get rid of the message by avoiding Acrobat Reader entirely, although this is a large amount of work just to get rid of a message.

This one is pretty comprehensive.

Another option that I'm sure you already thought of is to just build the form on the web page, instead of using the PDF. Again, a lot of extra work just to remove a message.