EstateAssist automates the preparation of probate court pleadings. It does so by filling Supreme Court standard probate forms, and local probate court forms. All of these come in the form of PDFs with fillable fields. EstateAssist takes your data and automatically fills those PDFs with the information needed for your filings.

A small number of users have had situations where some of the fields (usually a case caption) in their forms are invisible until the field is "clicked" by the user (and the text appears). There are two situations where this can happen (and both are easily resolved).

1) When the PDF is generated in the user's web browser.

If you open an EstateAssist probate form and fields (like the case caption) is not filling with data you have entered, it is likely due to you having the Adobe Acrobat extension installed and activated in your internet browser.

The issue can be caused by a combination of the 3 layers of technology that exist in that situation (the EstateAssist app, the internet browser, and Adobe). Specifically, Adobe sometimes does not show the text well. Fortunately, there is a simple fix and it does not lose you any functionality.

The user just needs to go to the Adobe extension properties and turn off the feature for opening PDFs in Adobe. You can watch a short video regarding this fix here.

2) When the PDF has been saved to your local computer and reopened in Adobe Acrobat.

The second situation is where the user has saved a generated PDF to their local computer and then reopen it. When reopened in Adobe, fields sometimes show blank until "clicked."

This is likely caused by the same underlying issue that causes issue #1, above. It appears to be related to Adobe. Adobe is aware that this happens with many PDFs (not just those created by Ohio courts). If you are interested, you can read more about it here. They appear to have this issue with a number of PDFs, with no certain way to ensure it won't happen.

We are in the process of researching options for working around this issue. Until we have one, the simplest solution is to open your PDFs with an application other than Adobe.

We have tested the courts' forms in the Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome, and Firefox internet browsers They all work very well, with all of the court PDFs. If you use Adobe as your default PDF reader, you can easily work around that by opening PDFs in the following way:

1) Use the right button on your mouse to click the PDF one time (not a double click).

2) A menu will open.

3) Click "Open with"

4) Select one of your internet browsers, and the form will open fine.

After looking into both of these issues, we are confident they are not being caused by EstateAssist. EstateAssist takes ordinary court PDFs and enters your data. Adobe appears to have an issue that occurs with some PDFs from many sources. We are happy that the two remedies above resolve the problem. However, we are continuing to look into technical options that offer other solutions. We will provide updates as we have more information.

3) A better way to save PDFs to your computer.

Because of the issues above, we suggest you do not just use "Save As" to save generated PDFs to your computer. Instead, while in EstateAssist, after making any changes you want to the form, we would suggest you use the "Print" function in your browser and change the "printer" to your computer's "Print to PDF" option. This will save your PDF to the folder on your computer that you select, but in a static format. The fillable fields will be "locked" and you will have a traditional PDF image that is easier to use, share, send, reopen, etc.

See more about this option here: Saving PDFs so they cannot be altered - YouTube