Every family has the pile. Permission slips, a medical form, the worksheet the teacher sent as a PDF that somebody has to print, fill in and photograph before Friday.

Most of it can be done on the computer you already own, without buying anything and usually without printing.

Filling in a form

If the PDF has real form fields, any modern browser will fill them. Edge does it, Chrome does it, and on a Mac so does Preview. Click into the boxes, type, then save a copy. For a bigger change, where the text on the page has to be rewritten, you need a real editor. A comparison of the best PDF editor options is worth reading before you download one at random.

If it has no fields, add text on top instead. Preview, Edge and Chrome all place text boxes anywhere on a page. It is not elegant, and the school will not mind.

Some free editors do that without adding a watermark, and some do not, which is the thing to check first.

Signing it

On a Mac, Preview creates a signature from the trackpad or the camera. On an iPhone or iPad, open the file, tap Markup, then the plus button, then Signature. Windows has nothing built in, so the free Adobe Acrobat Reader is the usual route.

Turning a paper page into a PDF

A phone camera is a scanner. The Notes app on an iPhone and Google Drive on Android both scan a page and save it as a PDF. The result is tidier than a photo and much easier to read.

If you want the text inside to be searchable later, run OCR. Google Drive does it free for files up to 2 MB, and PDF24 does it in a browser without an account.

Keeping the pile under control

Name files properly the day they arrive. Class, child, month. The five seconds you spend now is the difference between finding the immunisation form in March and filling it in twice.

Keep the original alongside anything you edited. Converting a PDF changes it, and the original is the version the school sent.

One more thing worth telling older children who fill in their own forms. A signature typed or drawn on a screen counts as a real signature for ordinary paperwork. It deserves the same care as one made with a pen.