How to digitize a paper form for free

What importing a scanned or photographed paper form will look like, and what you can do with a paper form today.

Digitizing a paper form means turning a printed sheet, a scan or a PDF into an online form that people fill in from a phone or a laptop, with every answer landing in one place instead of coming back by post or as an attachment.

The reference product does this by reading the file: you upload a photo, a scan or a PDF, and it drafts the questions, the options and the page structure for you. Tinyform does not have that import path yet. When it arrives, you will be able to hand it the original document and land in the editor with a draft to correct, rather than retyping every field by hand. Conditional logic and calculations would still be added after the import, because a printed form does not carry them.

What exists today is the other half of the workflow. You can rebuild the form in the editor at /forms/<id>/edit, start from one of the templates in the gallery (see How to use and create form templates), and share the link or embed it on a site. Every submission is stored under the form's Submissions tab, and each one can be downloaded as a PDF from there, so a paper trail is still one click away. How to create a fillable PDF for free covers that route end to end.