Creating PDF forms

I've just learned a (relatively) simple way to create a PDF form that can be emailed for others to fill out electronically and return by email. I've been wanting to be able to do this for ages, but was stumped because I thought it required expensive software. (While you can create fillable forms in Word and Excel, the process is clumsy and daunting. It also allows for little design capability, you have to choose "safe" fonts the recipient is guaranteed to have on their computer, and of course the recipient also needs Word and/or Excel installed on their machine.) You can certainly do it with Adobe Acrobat, which is very expensive, but the great discovery that it is easy to do with the public domain program Scribus, a page layout program that comes close to emulating market leaders such as Adobe InDesign and QuarkXpress. What is surprising is that to my knowledge, neither InDesign nor QuarkXpress can do this. Another case where open source software is actually better than a commercial program. By using Scribus, you are not limited in design, so you can let your creativity rip. Click here to see a simple video tutorial on using Scribus to create a fillable PDF form.