I am sure I am not the only person to have had the following problem: one has a pdf document (usually some kind of a form that one needs to fill out over and over again) in a pdf file, which is not a form in the PDF sense. One wants to be able to fill the form quickly, and some fields are always the same. A solution is to use package pdfpages to include the form into .tex document and add some text with absolute positioning. Then each time one needs to fill the form, all it takes is a quick change of some text. This works, but the process of finding the correct absolute positions is slow even if one uses the binary search. Is there a tool to help with this? Or a better solution perhaps?
(I know of pdfedit, but it is unstable for me.)
Best Answer
I have a really amazing bit of technical wizardry that helps me to do this. It's called a Rectangular Uniform Long-Edge Reader. You need a your document in Pointed Regular Inked Neat Typeset Editable Document form. Once you have that, place the Rectangular Uniform Long-Edge Reader against the Pointed Regular Inked Neat Typeset Editable Document and the Reader will magically tell you where the boxes are!
That said, I usually just use something like xournal or jarnal to do this as it saves Perishable Absorbent Pulped Environmental Resources.