Eh up
Sorry to hear some of you are having issues.
(the rest of this post is very Mac-centric, and most won't be of relevance to Windows users, unless you enjoy a good computer-based rant)
I'm Mac-based myself, and the one thing I will say is I've given up trying to make these forms compatible with Apple's default PDF viewer, "Preview" (which is otherwise great). I don't know why they don't work with it - in the old days (when the OS was "El Capitan" and earlier) they worked well, but when I got a new Mac with... what are we on now, "Mojave"?... various bits don't work any more. The drop-downs are flakey at best, non-functional at worst... and I swear the last time I looked (a few months ago), the text boxes could fit more than one number in them, but yep, you're right, now they don't, making the forms pretty much unusable. Huh
Here's what I do:
I use the free Adobe Acrobat Reader to fill out all my EICs, EICRs and MEIWCs. The PDF forms, when displayed on Acrobat, look as they do when designed in OpenOffice. Funnily enough, when I designed the forms, I wanted to be able to fit "60898" in the "BS-EN" box, and "2x2.5" in the conductor details, and ">2000" in the IR boxes, so I made sure they did!
Quite what Preview is doing to mess it all up, I don't know.
Another issue I've found is that, even if you fill out the form in Acrobat, and "sign" it (so it's no longer editable), and save it... at this point, it should be a fixed PDF... if you then load it into Preview, quite a lot of the fields are blank. The only way I've found that enables me to (a) get the forms to work as intended, and (b) generate a copy that's guaranteed to look as intented when I send to my clients, is:
- fill out the form using Adobe Acrobat, save it before signing it, close the document (in Acrobat)
- duplicate the file (in Finder)
- load the duplicate in Acrobat, sign it and save it
- use an app called "PDF Printer" which fools Acrobat into thinking you're "printing" the PDF to a printer, but it's actually just a program that generates a proper static PDF
- PDF Printer generates the static PDF, and displays it in Preview, and at this point it looks spot on
- I use Preview to rotate the test results page (so it's in landscape), then save it as "whatever-signed.pdf"
- That's the file I send to the client
I hate that it doesn't "just work," and I particularly hate that the only way I can get it to work is by downloading the bloated, proprietary Adobe Acrobat reader, the authors of which are so contemptuous of their users that they deliberately disable Apple's buit-in "print to PDF" feature (unless you purchase the full version, of course). I'm using free, open source software to generate the forms (OpenOffice) and I don't know which of the gazillion options to change to make it work just as intended on everything. I don't have access to a Windows computer, or an iPad/iPhone, so I can't see what the forms look like on probably 70% of the devices that people use, I'm afraid. I'm sure if I paid for the full version of Adobe PDF whatever it's called, I'd be able to generate beautiful forms that looked perfect on everything. Ain't gonna happen, though, I'm afraid.
(I hope it's clear from the above that I'm frustrated at things, not people. I tried to make something useful. I'm sorry it's not that simple.)
Cheers all