<p>Dude - my daughter also refused online submission for the reasons you gave. Her high school packages applications to send, so this is what we did.</p>
<p>She filled out the Common App for everything except the long essay. We bought Adobe Professional through my husband's school (we got an educator's discount, then donated the program to the school, we paid about $100, wrote off some of it and he uses the program). She used Professional for the supplements. It was not hard to learn how to do the blank filling. I played with it for about 20 minutes, just asking questions in the Help (no useful documentation, of course), figured out how to do it, showed by daughter, and off she went. It took her less than 2 hours to do 8 app supplements - it would have gone faster but, she did them in 2 batches, and it took about 15 minutes the second time to remember - Oh yeah, this is how we did it. She also experimented with fonts until she found one that allowed the work to be neat, legible, and fit the spaces, and didn't use the same font every time because of the size of the spaces.
She typed her long essay on an entirely separate piece of paper, and just put "See attached" in the corresponding space on the Common App.
So she actually did all 3 things that have been recommended, and it worked very well, for her. Demographics look fine on the Common App, people run into trouble on the essays - she was ruthless in editing her short essay so it fit into the space. Pro works great on those fill in the blanks - I actually suggested she download the COmmon App into Pro, and type the long essay directly into the essay spot, but she preferred her way - different strokes.</p>