Show HN: CommonForms – open models to auto-detect PDF form fields

Existing “auto-fillable” tools are pretty lackluster in my experience. CommonForms is tooling that can automatically detect form fields in PDFs and turn those PDFs into fillable documents. The dataset is ~500k form pages pulled from Common Crawl, which I trained the object detectors on. For being vision only, the results are pretty remarkable!

Releasing the dataset, paper, models, and (imo most importantly) simple/convenient tooling to automatically prepare any PDF.

Links: Repo: https://github.com/jbarrow/commonforms - Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.16506