<p>Did you fill out the common app by hand, or did you somehow type within the form using Adobe Acrobat? I am trying to figure out how to convert the PDF to a type-able document...does anyone know how to do this? Or, do people generally fill the forms out by hand? Just wondering!</p>
<p>It's been a couple of months, but if I recall we filled everything out online.</p>
<p>Check out this</a> thread - it has a link to a site that will let you convert PDFs to Word documents.</p>
<p>Although, you can also fill out and submit the forms online at the Common App site - any particular reason you don't want to do that?</p>
<p>So if you convert the PDF to Word documents and fill out the application, you'll have to mail it in. To quaere's point, why wouldn't you want to fill it out online?</p>
<p>Most probably I will fill it out online. I have another question about this though--do they give you x amount of characters for a single answer space? I wanted to type it out so that I could format the font size smaller, allowing myself more space--something I thought I probably wouldn't be able to do online, specifically in the extracurricular or short answer areas.</p>
<p>Not likely the online process will allow you to change the font size to squeeze more information in. There might be another way to do that by adding supplemental material, but I couldn't tell you how to do that.</p>
<p>Some times there's a reason there's only a certain amount of space alloted. It forces you to prioritize and only communicate what's important.</p>
<p>What you communicate and how you communicate is important. Overwhelming already overwhelmed admissions people with huge volumes of information may work against you.</p>
<p>The short answer area has an extremely generous character limit (I'm longwinded, the first draft of my response ran about 100 words over, and I still only used about half of the characters available). The EC area has tighter character limits, but their font is formatted fairly small - small enough to be annoying to admissions officers if you made it smaller. If you can't explain all your ECs in the boxes as they are, that's a sign that you should transfer some info to the Additional Information section.</p>
<p>You can type with PDF, actually. You just have to have the store-bought version of Adobe, not the free ones you can download off line</p>
<p>Thanks for the info--it sounds like they took into account people like myself, who have "eschew verbosity" spewed across every graded English essay...the zamzar site is definitely helpful, great to finally find out how to type with PDFs, but you have to insert text boxes over the document and I can see that it might get a little messy. It seems I might just go all modern and stick with the internet.</p>
<p>Good luck with your applications!</p>
<p>Given your screen name, I assume you're shooting for the top schools. They will not be impressed by verbosity, just as your English teachers aren't. In fact, the more succinct you can make your writing, the better. Writing succinctly is much more difficult and requires much more thought. If you want to show off your skills, work on your editing.</p>