Comments on: When good form layouts don’t work

By: Micah

Micah — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 17:55:52 +0000

In my particular instance, I had a square that I wanted to be recognized as a checkbox. The square’s dimensions were 0p9 by 0p9 and the stroke was .5pt. I found that if I made the stroke on the inside of the square, it would be recognized, yet if I put it on the outside of the square, it would not. Hopefully somebody can use this information.

By: Aaron

Aaron — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 09:31:25 +0000

Hmm. I’ve made the boxes and circles 2pt, and exported as 1.7, and I can’t get Acrobat to convert them to checkboxes for me. Anyone else have tips?

By: Aleta

Aleta — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 23:44:19 +0000

I have Acrobat 7.0, and it sort of has a command for that at “Advanced>Forms>Make Form Fillable in Adobe Designer”. I think it’s only in the PC version though. And the result looks terrible. Rules look like question marks; eps, PSD, and ai images don’t appear; formatting is screwy, etc. I sure hope Acrobat 8 does a better job of it. However, I’ve used Adobe Designer successfully to create interactive forms from scratch. It’s not like working with InDesign, but if you need something that people can fill out and e-mail the results back to you, it works pretty well. The filled-in information is saved to an XML file and e-mailed to an address you’ve embedded in the PDF. The person who receives the file can either repopulate their copy of the form using “Advanced>Forms>Import Data to Form” or just open it in their browser.

By: Matt

Matt — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 00:42:20 +0000

Yep I agree with Craig re checkboxes - .5pt & 2pt strokes seem to work (inline or not), but 1pt doesn’t.

Also I’ve found it’s important that you export the PDF as version 1.7 (Acrobat 8).

By: vectorbabe

vectorbabe — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 18:18:49 +0000

Yes, this is for Acrobat 8 only. And one of the reasons I totally suggest upgrading to 8.

By: Dave Courtemanche

Dave Courtemanche — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 18:05:08 +0000

Seems like this is an Acrobat 8 feature - I don’t have a Field Recognition option in 7.

By: Craig Swanson

Craig Swanson — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 22:18:48 +0000

I might have another piece for the form field recognition puzzle. We created an example InDesign file, using inline rectangles. Acrobat recognized about half of the rectangles as checkboxes — so it does appear that inline objects can be used in form recognition, although the results were somewhat random.

We discovered that changing the stroke weight of those rectangles fixed the recognition problems. Originally, our checkboxes were 1pt black lines — and the results were spotty at best. But simply switching to 0.5pt or 2pt strokes seems to have worked in every test we’ve run.

I’m sure there are other factors involved. But there are cases where inline graphics can work for form recognition. I’d be curious. Try changing the stroke weight and see if that has an impact on your test files.

By: Eugene

Eugene — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 19:59:53 +0000

Oh that’s great, I was having real problems with fillable forms. I always anchored boxes like that thinking it was ok to do so. I was nearly pulling my hair out before I just said forget it. But now I’ll give it a shot again and hopefully have some success.

By: David

David — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 19:15:34 +0000

Great tip! I actually had a job recently where this would have come in handy. I wish I could go back and do it again.
I made my form fields, but they were the rigid ones in Acrobat. This is great to know…