“Required” glitch in CS 6 Text Forms
One of the major new features in CS 6 is the addition of PDF forms. These allow you to add forms to your InDesign file before exporting as a PDF.
Unfortunately a tiny bug slipped by the team and got into the finished product:
If you apply the “Required” label to a text field, the field is indicated as required in Acrobat, but there is no alert when the user goes to submit or print the form. The Required setting is essentially disabled although it is checked in Acrobat. Worse, deselecting the setting and then reapplying it in Acrobat doesn’t fix the problem.
The easiest way to fix this problem is to not apply the Required setting to a text form field in InDesign. Then, when you open the the file in Acrobat you can apply the Required setting without any problems.
Fortunately this bug only applies to text form fields. Setting Required to any of the other form objects works correctly.
Those “jolly folks” at Adobe are well aware of this bug and thoroughly expect it to be fixed in an update at a future date.
Yep, it’s great that you can make fields editable in ID6, but the inability to select the font required in the final PDF field is just crazy. Also it doesn’t recognize round corner boxes which all our form fields are based on. The text boxes have an outline in the ID6 artwork, but when exported to Acrobat all of the outlines on every field disappear leaving a form with no visible navigation. Either I must be doing something wrong or this function isn’t as helpful as everyone thinks. A vast amount of work still has to be done to the fields in Acrobat.
Forestboy,
I agree with you that there is a lot to be done for form fields in InDesign, but I think the basic idea is very helpful.
I am most enthused by the added appearance formats and states for check boxes and radio button. These objects not only can have rounded corners, but they can have effects such as transparency, fill modes, bevels, drop shadows, and other effects. They can even have imported graphics from Photoshop and Illustrator and they recognize the object layers in those imported graphics.
Even more, unlike the check boxes and radio buttons in Acrobat, InDesign creates those form fields with six different appearance states: Normal On, Normal Off, Rollover On, Rollover Off, Click On, and Click Off. These make for a very dynamic experience filling out the form.
I’m not too sure why you lost the strokes for text fields and the other forms, but my quick tests allowed me to set either fill or strokes to all the form fields and they showed up in the Acrobat document.
I think of the form fields as being primarily used to create more visually graphic form documents. Then these PDFs can be passed onto the form data geeks who will customize them as necessary.
Setting the font for text fields, combo boxes, etc. is an oversight. And there are many other attributes found in Acrobat that are missing in InDesign’s controls. My pet peeve is that a combo box, which is by definition a list that can be selected or typed with a custom entry, does not have that option. Without that option it’s hardly a combo box. It’s just a list box without a downward pointing arrow.
But the most important thing about the form fields is that we use them! The InDesign team is not going to spend precious engineering time advancing this feature if no one is using it.
I don’t believe the required option ever prevented printing in Acrobat–only when using the Submit button. Of course, it could be done with Javascript, but I’m referring to the built in function.
All the new features aside, I would rather build the form in LiveCycle Designer in order to have access to much more powerful features. (Yes–even if it means running Parallels, Windows 7, and Acrobat Pro on my Mac!)
IDEAS,
Yes, you’re right. The Print option is available even if the required form field is not selected. Strange. It should prevent printing, IMHO.
The idea behind the print option ignoring the required field is that a user may need to print the form, go gather the info by hand, and then return to fill out the electronic form. But I think there should at least be a warning dialog that the user can bypass when printing.
I like your idea of a warning dialog that would alert someone that the form wasn’t finished.
Just saw a post from an Adobe engineer in the ID forum on this topic. He confirms it is a known issue and posts an easy workaround in Acrobat:
https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1019171?tstart=0
One easy work around would be to ‘Clear Form’ after exporting to PDF. The ‘required’ field will then be honored.
soooooo frustrating that you can’t change the font in the Buttons and Forms pdf options…. and when I edit the fields in Acrobat and change the font to Helvetica using Properties, Appearance, it corrupts the fields…. massive oversight
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