InDesign Tips for Optimal Form Wizardy in Acrobat

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One of the best features in Acrobat Pro 9 is its Form Wizard (Forms > Start Wizard). You create a static form in InDesign, export it to PDF, open the PDF in Acro and tell the Wizard to have at it. Acrobat automatically converts the boxes, lines, and circles it detects in the active PDF into interactive form fields like checkboxes, text fields, and radio buttons, and steps you through final tweaks. Ubercool.

The problem is that—alas—it’s just software, and not an actual wizard (you LIE, Adobe!) so sometimes the Forms Wizard misses or misclassifies some of the form elements you created in InDesign. Acrobat might consider the  fields that you meant to be “Name,” “Title,” and “Company” to be just pretty lines and completely ignore them; or labels the first field Title, the second one Company, and the third one Shoe Size.

What’s needed here is a cheat sheet—what’s the best way to create a checkbox, for example, in InDesign so that Acrobat’s auto form field recognition knows it’s a checkbox type of form field and not a simple graphic element? Where should you put your field labels so the program knows which label belongs to which field?

Adobe’s Lori DeFurio to the rescue! Check out this partial screen shot from the tutorial she just posted:

Lori is an Acrobat evangelist for Adobe, and really knows what it’s like for us end users and designers who are trying to get other Creative Suite program’s files to play nice with Acrobat.

Here’s that link to the tutorial again: Designing Forms for Auto Field Detection in Adobe Acrobat.