Designing Acrobat Forms in InDesign: New Resources

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Many of us like to use InDesign’s powerful layout features to create forms which can be made “live” in Acrobat. Acrobat has come a long way with the Form Field Recognition features in Acrobat 8 and especially Acrobat 9 Pro, but it’s still a somewhat error-prone multi-step process: (1) Create the form in InDesign. (2) Export as a PDF using the correct settings. (3) Choose Forms > Start Form Wizard in Acrobat. Then view the result, and, if you haven’t correctly guessed Acrobat’s algorithm for Form Field Recognition, correcting the mistakes, or going back to InDesign and starting again.

There are two new resources now available to make the process easier, mentioned today in Bob Bringhurst’s Adobe blog.

Adobe asked Gabriel Powell to create an instructional video on the process of creating forms in InDesign and Acrobat which is very well done. It’s available in a small format at the Adobe Design Center. And in a larger format at Adobe TV. It gives a good introduction to someone who’s new at creating forms.

The resource which excites me even more is for the more advanced user: The Acrobat team has never documented what is supposed to work (and what not) in the Form Field Recognition feature. It’s always been a matter of trial and error to see what works. Bob managed to find this PDF document that provides technical details on Form Field Recogition, and a list of best practices. This is truly invaluable.