Creating Fillable PDF Forms With InDesign and Adobe Acrobat _ Vectortuts+

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Drew DuPont on Aug 8th 2012 with 10 comments

Tutorial Details

Program: Adobe InDesign & Acrobat CS5Difficulty: IntermediateEstimated Completion Time: 1 Hour

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Creating forms in Acrobat can be a taxing process. The recognition software may create fields on one line butnot the next. You may get a radio button where you wanted a checkbox. Seemingly simple tasks that shouldtake minutes can take hours to correct and fine tune. In this tutorial, you will learn how to design a clean,working form to minimize your workflow headaches.

The first rule of thumb is to keep your design uncluttered. The OCR (Optical Character Recognition) softwarethat Acrobat uses to convert your design into a working form can only see clear, legible type andhigh-contrasting elements. The best way to ensure that your design is readable is to stick to a whitebackground with black type for any info that needs to be converted. Avoid fancy graphical elements in thebackground. Also make sure elements are separated and there is no overlapping text, which can cause formfields to fuse together and do other funky things that can add hours to your work.

We’ll go through creating a simple form, but by no means does your design have to look exactly like this toget a form that works. Just follow the instructions on spacing and how to place form fields and otherwise doyour own thing with it.

Program: Adobe InDesign & Acrobat CS5Difficulty:IntermediateEstimated Completion Time: 1 Hour

First create a new document in InDesign. Set up a file that is 4.25 in x 8.5 in. The form I am creating doublesas a printed mailer, so I am adding a standard bleed of 0.125 in.

Now to typeset the form. Acrobat recognizes clear, legible text, so try to use a clean, legible typeface (such asHelvetica or another easy-to-read font) for the text that will precede the fields. The reason for this is soAcrobat can name the form elements accurately without getting confused. If your document has a headline ortitle, you can use a fancier font there, though.


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You want to be able to see where every tab and space is in the document so make sure you can see all hiddencharacters. To do this in InDesign, select Type > Show Hidden Characters.

To add an easily editable underline to your form fields, select the space directly after the name of the fieldand insert a tab (Tab). Open the Tabs palette by selecting Type > Tabs. Select a Right-Justified Tab (the arrowpointing to the right and down) and click on the ruler in the Tabs palette to insert the tab. Now drag the tab allthe way to the right margin and it should snap in place.

Highlight the Tab and open the Underline Options, which is accessed by clicking the icon in the upper rightcorner of the Character palette. Click the "Underline On" checkbox and set the underline weight to 0.5 pt. Ifthe stroke is too thin, Acrobat won’t recognize it as a text field.

Add tabs to each field requiring underlines, then use the Eyedropper Tool (I) to apply it to the other fields byhighlighting them.

Not all fields need to take up the entire line, such as the phone number or zip/mailing code fields, and you’llwant to fit two fields on a single line. Do this by deleting the paragraph return on the first line and opening theTabs palette again (Type > Tabs). Insert an additional tab by clicking the ruler and dragging it to the desiredlocation.

Now those fields are too cramped together! This will be problematic on the printed form when someone triesto fill it out by hand. I typically give it about 1⁄8 inch of headroom just to be sure. Place the cursor in the lineyou’re adjusting. You’ll then change the Space Before setting in the Paragraph palette to 0.125 in. Make sure


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all text fields have the same Space Before setting. I set the paragraphs without text fields to 0.625 in.

Next, set up a basic table by selecting the Type Tool (T), insert the cursor where the table will be placed, andthen select Table > Insert Table. Choose the number of rows and columns you’ll need. For this form, I usedsix columns and seven rows, with one header row.

Now to format the table. I want the header row to be a similar orange color to maintain consistency with mycolor scheme. Highlight the header row by hovering over the left edge of the row with the Type Tool (T) untila black arrow appears, then click it. Change the Fill Color in the Swatches palette.

The best way to get fillable text boxes to be recognized by the OCR is to leave a blank white box surroundedby a black line. Highlight the body rows of the table and change the stroke weight to 0.5pt to match theweight of the text field underlines.

To make the table look less boxy, remove the stroke on the exterior of the table by highlighting the leftcolumn, then selecting only the left exterior stroke in the Property Inspector (pictured below) and settingStroke Width to zero. Do the same to the right column to remove the opposite side. I also removed the blackstroke around the header and changed the interior strokes to white.

Merge the body cells in the left column by highlighting them and selecting Table > Merge Cells.


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Insert your text into the table. Drag the edges of the cells so that they fit the text.

Now to add checkboxes. The OCR will generally recognize any small, empty square with a black strokearound it as a checkbox. Conversely, any circle with a black stroke will be recognized as a radio button. (Thedifference is that you can select multiple checkboxes but only one radio button.) The symbol font Wingdingshas a black square and a black circle glyph that will work pretty well, but you will probably have to bumpthem up a few point sizes to match the height of the typeface you’re working with. Access the glyph you’relooking for under Type > Glyphs and select Wingdings.

After adding few more graphical elements such as credit card logos and an orange accent at the bottom of thepage, we are finished with the design! Time to turn this thing into a working form.

Select File > Export and choose to export as PDF (Print).

Open the exported PDF in Adobe Acrobat.Now Select Forms > Start Form Wizard and choose "Use the current document or browse to a PDF file," then


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"Use the current document." Acrobat will instantly fill in the blank underlines and table cells with text fieldsand the checkboxes will become checkable.

We’re not done yet! Acrobat has some difficulty parsing every field, so let’s check over them to make surethey’re correct. A quick method to ensure uniform formatting is to select all of the form fields at once andchange them at the same time. Click-drag the mouse over all of the form fields (not the checkboxes orsignature) and select stragglers with Command-click. Next, right click on one of the highlighted fields andselect Properties.

In the Appearance menu, set the font to Helvetica and the font size to 8. If the font size is left on the defaultsetting of Auto, the text will resize according to the size of the text field and can look pretty ugly.

Switch to the Options menu. In some rare cases, Acrobat will set a character limit on a field. Uncheck theboxes next to "Limit of _ characters" and "Comb of _ characters" to avoid broken fields. Also turn off "Scrolllong text" which limits the length of the text entered to the text field’s length, so the user can’t type a novelinto your form.

Acrobat tends to position the fields a little high above the baseline, causing further ugliness when enteringtext. To correct this, reselect the fields you want to lower and nudge them down with the arrow keys. The bestway to test where the entered text will sit is by selecting Preview in the upper left hand corner of the windowand typing some sample text.

If you notice, the OCR didn’t fill in every blank in the table. This is common, and luckily it’s an easy fix.Click Add New Field in the upper left hand corner of the window and choose Text Box.

Now place and resize the field using the bounding box around the field. If you need a little help aligning thebox with the other fields, turn on Rulers (Command + R) and drag a guide out from the ruler. Remove


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unwanted fields by selecting the field offender and hitting delete.

You can also set up a digital signature on the form if necessary. In this case, the OCR read the word signatureand set it up automatically. If you need to set up additional signature fields, Select Add New Field >Signature.

The Notes field will be an issue. Notice that it is split into two separate fields, but we want it to wrap to thenext line. Acrobat is not a word processor, so there is absolutely no way to adjust leading (line spacing,) sothe underlines can’t be lined up with the text, so we will remove the lines to make way for a multiline textfield.

To remove the lines without going back into InDesign, click on Close Form Editing in the upper right cornerof the window and go to Tools > Advanced Editing > TouchUp Object Tool. Now select each unwantedunderline and hit Delete.

Back in Form Editing mode, delete the old text fields and create a new one big enough to accommodate twolines of text. Open the Properties of the text field and go to Appearance and check "Multiline". This allowsthe text to wrap to the next line.

Once your form is clean and ready to send out, Click Close Form Editing, save your work, then selectAdvanced > Extend Privileges in Adobe Reader. If you skip this step, the user won’t be able to save enteredtext and it becomes a read-only file.

Tip: Make sure you are finished editing the form: once you extend privileges, the file is locked and you won’tbe able to alter the design of the form. Make a backup with a different name, like "form_editable.pdf" orsomething like that.


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Forms can be a hassle, but with practice, you can produce clean, easy-to-navigate PDFs with a few simpletweaks. Even if you have already worked with fillable forms, hopefully this tutorial has given you somesuggestions to make the process a little easier. If you have any tips we didn’t go over today, let us hear themin the comments.

By Drew DuPontThis author has yet to write their bio.

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Creating Fillable PDF Forms With InDesign and Adobe Acrobat _ Vectortuts+