Who said SAP is only for Enterprise Resource Planning?

Recently, I had a need to edit a PDF document to correct a typo in my last name. I was in my office.My office laptop and network has strong restictions. I cannot download and install any external software. I need to take help from our office help-desk to install any legitimate software. Sadly, they did not have a PDF editor for us. And they did not have permission to install free trial software from web.

My requirement was to correct my last name immediately. There was an extra ‘H’. Correct spelling is Shrestha and it was misspelled as Shres’H’tha. I did not want to wait till the evening to go home and use the PDF editor at my personal laptop. Being an ABAPer, I thought of making use of SAP Adobe Form. 🙂 So why wait? I wore my developer’s hat; hit the SAP t-code ‘SFP‘ Form Builder: Entry Point.

You can do the below steps, even if you have never worked in Adobe forms. You just need to have the Adobe LifeCycle Designer installed in your system. Luckily for me, I had it in my system by default.

Step 1: Go to t-code ‘SFP’ and create the Interface as shown below. Save it in a transport or save as local object. Activate it.

Step 2: Go to t-code ‘SFP’ again and create the Form. Give the Interface name which you created above. Save it in transport or save as local object.

Important: Go to Layout Tab, Tools menu and Import.

This is the most import step. Here we need to import the PDF file which we want to edit. I will select my file which needs to be edited. The PDF opens up like in PDF editor. Do whatever you want to. We can add lines, change fonts, colors, add logo/pic etc. My requirement was to correct my last name. I clicked on the line/word and removed the extra ‘H’ from my last name (as I was doing in normal PDF editor).

Go to Print Preview Tab, hover your mouse on the PDF and you see the SAVE icon. Save it at your desired destination folder in your system and open it to see the new clean error free PDF.

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Note: This is not a tutorial for SAP Adobe Form. This is just an example of an unorthodox usage of SAP Adobe Form to meet a practical need.

Hope you liked this post. Did you ever apply any such ingenious or practical solutions? Would you like to share in the comment section?

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Updated: 07/14/2015. Credit to one of our readers.

We learn by sharing. This post is a perfect example. We were not aware that there was an easy alternative for the same.

One of our readers have posted a better alternative for the same thing above. We would like to thank him/her for sharing this useful information.

Instead of doing all the work shown above, just follow the below steps.

assumption:Adobe LiveCycle is installed in your machine

1. Browse: %ProgramFiles(x86)%\Adobe\Designer 9.0\ (or Designer 8.0, which ever version you have)

2. Run: FormDesigner.exe

3. Do your things in the PDF editor