Forms now available in PDF and Microsoft Word

When we first started putting up scanned paper forms in our Docs page a few years ago, it was possible to make Google Docs based text files using raw HTML, which allowed us to do some pretty advanced formatting for many of the naturalization application forms that we wanted to distribute (which aren't easily available from other sources).

Using web browser friendly HTML made sense at the time for two reasons: it allowed accessibility from mobile devices that didn't have word processor programs, and it allowed the text in the documents to be easily searchable from the web.

Times have changed, though, so we're changing with it. We've completely redone the Docs page, adding Adobe PDF and Microsoft Word documents for many of the forms (and we will continue to add more). We've even added some documents that weren't there before (such as the Korean applicant samples from the てびキ {tebiki} (Handbook). We've also linked many of the documents to corresponding posts explaining the form. This should make navigating the site a little easier. Finally, we've cleaned up the page of technical typos that made the rendering of the page less than ideal in the past.

When I first started this site, I wanted these documents to be a little more accessible to those who have never done the process, so one could see that the application process, while not trivial, is not as impossible or opaque as people often assume.