Why does my PDF document not process in Signable?

As you may know, our Signable app accepts Word, Excel and PDF documents. There are thousands of different types of PDFs that exist, so our system will always convert all PDFs into our own format that resembles a ‘standard‘ type. However, our system does not support editable PDFs, also known as form-field PDFs. This is due to these types of PDFs being live and interactive documents that do not need to be downloaded, to be edited in any way.
Because of this, our system will either not allow the PDF to be processed, or will wipe all information added to this PDF.
What you will need to do is ‘flatten‘ these types of PDFs outside of Signable, so that your information stays on your document and processes just fine.
Here’s how to flatten a PDF on both Windows & Mac:

How to flatten a PDF document on Windows:

Open up your PDF document. Once open, click ‘File’, then ‘Print‘. You’re then going to click on the drop down on ‘Printer‘ and select ‘Microsoft Print to PDF‘, followed by clicking the ‘Print‘ button.

You’ll then prompted to save your document down. Save it as something memorable as this is going to be your new document to upload. Once given a name, go ahead and click ‘Save’. Your document’s information has now been flattened and will upload onto Signable, without any issues.

How to flatten a PDF document on Mac:

Open your ‘Finder‘, right-click on your document and hover your mouse over ‘Open With‘ and click ‘Preview‘.

Once here, click on the drop down at the bottom and select ‘Save as PDF‘, followed by clicking ‘Print‘.

You should then be directed to a page to save this file, rather than print it. Give it a memorable title and click ‘Save‘.
This document has now been flattened and will keep all information in place and will now process into our system, successfully.

If for whatever reason the above guides don’t work for you, you can also find PDF flatten tools online.

If flattening your PDF document does not work, please contact support: help@signable.app