Saving PDF form on Mac prevents viewing and printing by another viewer

Question

We run a student competition which is affiliated with a national competition.  The national competition provides a set of forms that must be filled out by the students, teachers, etc.  We have a process set up whereby students can download a PDF form (which is enabled by the authors  for saving from Reader).  They are supposed to fill out this form (actually several of them), and then save the file(s) to their drive.  Once they have the forms filled out and approved by their teacher, they upload them to our website via a standard web form, which simply saves the uploaded PDF for later viewing by the student, teachers, judges, and committee members.  When students do this using Adobe Reader on a PC, it works fine.  (I'm not sure if Reader X works, actually, but I know Reader 9 does).  The problem, though, comes up with Mac users.  When they do the same thing, it seems to override the extended rights in the document, resulting in a document saved on their disk that displays with all the fields initially unviewable (that is  they all appear blank).  If you click on one of the fields, you can view the fields one at a time.  Each field appears and disappears as you move thru the document.  But we can't simply read the form, nor can we print a copy (which is necessary if the student wins and proceeds to the national competition.)  This is true if the form is uploaded or emailed or transported by USB drive--it is simply a property of the saved file.   In our testing, this appears to be a generic property of forms processed on  a Mac--and we haven't found a way around it.  Is there any way for a student who has filled out a form on a Mac to save the form while PRESERVING the extended rights?  Or do we just have to tell them that Macs don't work right?  If there is a way for them to do this, I could provide the instructions on the page that delivers the forms.  But we've tried to explore the Mac interface (inside Safari and in the PDF viewer that is provided on the Mac systems) and can't find any place that gives options that seem to affect the extended rights.  Help!

Answer 1

kblyons46 wrote:
and we haven't found a way around it.  Is there any way for a student who has filled out a form on a Mac to save the form while PRESERVING the extended rights? 
There's an easy way around it. Make sure they are using Adobe Reader to fill in the form. 99% of these cases are because they are using the Mac Preview application to open PDF's and it will corrupt Adobe forms.