Ted Padova’s AUC Blog

One of the great new features in Acrobat 8 for forms designers is a command in Acrobat 8 Professional called Run Form Field Recognition. You simply open a PDF converted from just about any program and select Forms>Run Form Field Recognition. Acrobat then magically adds form fields to your PDF file. And it handles the field additions in an instant.

Run Form Field Recognition does a super job on simple forms and it recognizes most text fields, adds digital signature fields, and even creates comb fields. However, the Run Form Field Recognition feature in Acrobat isn’t perfect and often misses checkboxes and radio buttons and it really falls apart when trying to recognize fields on complex and graphically intense forms. Take Figure 1 as an example. When I run the menu command, no fields are recognized on this form.

Figure 1

Obscure field designs and those field locations that are not created with lines are often missed with the Run Form Field Recognition command. The way to work around this problem and get the most out of Run Form Field Recognition is to create two forms. One form for using Run Form Field Recognition and one form that represents your final design layout. If you happen to be an Adobe Illustrator or Adobe InDesign user, then you can create a single layered document in Illustrator or InDesign containing both the form you use for Run Form Field Recognition and the final layout.

In Figure 2 you can see a form I created in Adobe Illustrator and exported as PDF as a layered file. In Acrobat I turn off the layers I won’t need to use the Run Form Field Recognition command and you can see the temporary layer I created just for using the Run Form Field Recognition command. Note that you don’t need to turn off any layers. As a matter of fact Acrobat will recognize fields if all layers are turned off. I usually turn off the layers just as a matter of practice so I can clearly see the layout where I’m using Run Form Field Recognition.

Figure 2

After using Run Form Field Recognition and turning on my Background and permanent Fields layers you can see the fields that Run Form Field Recognition created in Figure 3. Again, it’s not perfect. The radio buttons and checkboxes were missed. But with a little polish with some field sizing, the creation of an extra layer in Illustrator was a fraction of the time that would be needed for me to manually create the text fields.

Figure 3

As a final step, I open the layers panel and select Flatten Layers as shown in Figure 4. Notice that the temporary fields layer is hidden. When you flatten layers in Acrobat all hidden layers are tossed.

Figure 4

To get ready for Acrobat 8 and Run Form Field Recognition, plan now on designing forms that optimize using the command to successfully populate your forms. With a little planning ahead of time, you’ll save much time when creating PDF forms.

Download this form and try it yourself when you upgrade to Acrobat 8. golfOrderFormLayered.pdf

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