Form Field Recognition
Although I don’t use this feature of Acrobat 8 as much as some of the others, and since no one else has commented on it - I will!
While the average IT-type user tends to use tools such as Adobe Designer as their form design tool, most of the “Creative Pros” who are taske to create forms will instead favor the tools they know - such as Adobe InDesign. Unfortunately, there are no “form tools” in InDesign - so what to do??
Enter Acrobat 8 & the new Form Field Recognition feature!
I just open up my existing “flat” PDF, such as this printable version of the FedEx form:
I could sit there and manually add all the fields - but I have better things to do (and it wouldn’t really be a good demo!). Instead, I will go to the Forms menu of Acrobat 8 & choose “Run Form Field Recognition”.
Acrobat will process for a little (it’s VERY fast!) and when it’s done it will hilight all of the newly created fields while presenting me with a detailed report on all created fields and suggestions for what to do next.
Now, it’s not 100% perfect (at least on this form) - but it certainly is saving me a LOT of work!
Oh, and if the graphic changes, I don’t need to re-run the recognition (esp. since I’ll have already added more fields, added logic, etc.) - I just use the Replace Pages command to replace the content out from under the fields.
September 22nd, 2006 at 12:04 am
Leonard, I’m told that the shipping version of 8 will recognize fields by type, such as converting signature blocks to digital signature fields. I can’t wait to get my hands on that!
—Carl
January 29th, 2007 at 11:55 am
Is this function available through the ActiveX interface? Our application would be improved a lot if we had access to this feature.
January 29th, 2007 at 8:25 pm
No, this feature is not exposed to the ActiveX/COM interfaces.
I believe, however, that it can be called from the Plugin interfaces. So you could write a plugin that would expose the feature via COM and then call that from your application.
Leonard