Handwriting on forms may result in RFEs?

[omgslay 2]

The 2D barcodes on most AOS forms contain all the information you've filled into Acrobat. USCIS uses this to speed up scanning and presumably remove the need for OCR or manual entry.

 

There's a lot of advice on VJ about handwriting answers into computer-filled PDFs, such as writing "Unknown" into I-131s planned trip destination and trip dates, etc. Another glaring example is that I-94s can now be alphanumeric but the stupid I-130 form has validation that says "Numbers Only" for that field, making it impossible to fill via Adobe Acrobat. Our solution, until now, was to print everything 99% completed in Acrobat, and hand-write the fields that cannot be filled. But the 2D barcode on the bottom will obviously NOT reflect the handwritten changes. This means they may easily be missed by the person scanning them in.

 

What is the solution? I don't want to handwrite entire forms, that seems ridiculous. Ugh, how frustrating -- yet another reason paper forms are inferior.

[Boiler 43,445]

It does not take that long to handwrite them.

[omgslay 2]

Upon some further testing, it appears the barcodes don't change based on the filled form fields, whether you save / print from Chrome or Adobe, or even the paid Adobe Pro. I tested I-130, I-131, I-485, I-864 and I-765 -- basically all the forms with barcodes at the bottom. Furthermore, all barcode scanning apps display the encoded contents as just the form name, edition date, and page number.

 

That would suggest that filling in the form, printing it, and handwriting to complete should be fine, since they will have to scan the contents of the form anyway. Can anyone corroborate this?

[Family 3,483]

8 hours ago, omgslay said:

Upon some further testing, it appears the barcodes don't change based on the filled form fields, whether you save / print from Chrome or Adobe, or even the paid Adobe Pro. I tested I-130, I-131, I-485, I-864 and I-765 -- basically all the forms with barcodes at the bottom. Furthermore, all barcode scanning apps display the encoded contents as just the form name, edition date, and page number.

 

That would suggest that filling in the form, printing it, and handwriting to complete should be fine, since they will have to scan the contents of the form anyway. Can anyone corroborate this?

I can assure you that a combination of computer typed and handwriting on any form works without ever resulting in RFE.

[omgslay 2]

21 minutes ago, Family said:

I can assure you that a combination of computer typed and handwriting on any form works without ever resulting in RFE.

 

Yeah, that makes sense. I can see that the form data isn't currently being encoded into the barcodes, so I'm mailing 99% printed with 1% handwritten. As I'm sure many others have done.