Participant

Question

Fillable Saveable Form - Fields appear to be blank but aren't

Forum|Forum|17 years ago
February 28, 2009
26 replies
234498 views

We have a fillable savable form created with Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional. Sometimes the form emailed back to our office and opened in Reader Version 9 and it the form appears initially to be blank unless you click into the field - you can then see the data. However, you can't print the form with the data displayed. If using Reader version 8, then if you click the highlight button it acts like a toggle switch to view the data in the fields; however you still can't print.

Any ideas on what is causing this and how we can fix it?

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J

jcroberts

Participant

It seems to be an issue with the font. You can make a "blank" form visible by following these steps:

1. Click on Forms > Add or Edit Fields.
2. Click on Edit > Select All.
3. Right click on one of the form fields and click on Properties.
4. Click on the Appearances tab.
5. Change the font size.
6. Click Close.
7 Click on Close Form Editing.

K

kjez

Participant

This fix worked for me - can't thank you enough!

B

blampyre

Participant

We are also having this problem. It's very annoying, since I bought Acrobat 9 Pro espressly to be able to create saveable fillable forms.

In our case, some PDFs which are returned are fine; others appear to have no data until you click on a field. If the answer is that you must use Acrobat to fill in the form, I will just post something like that on our website. But it's not clear from the discussion below that this is really the problem. WE ALL NEED AN ANSWER TO THIS!!!

A

Anonymous

I had the same problem with forms being returned and the data only showing when the cursor was on the field. Downloaded FoxIt Reader and now I can read and print these forms. simple fix for those pesky forms that you can't read otherwise.

A

abrunson2010

Participant

We have several faculty members who create forms using Acrobat 9.3.x, send them to students, and receive the PDFs forms completed. When the faculty open the PDFs, the data is blank and will only appear when they click on the individual fields. This is incredibly annoying and we need a fix soon.

Is there a fix / patch / setting / workaround for this?

D

dblancard

Participant

We continue to have the same problem....

The ONLY workaround we have come up with is to use a different reader to view/print the returned forms. We use FoxIt.

I'm still amazed that adobe cannot fix this issue. I'll never purchase another adobe product if I can avoid it.

Dave B.

G

George_Johnson

Inspiring

Dave B.,

It's not really fair to blame Adobe for this. The problem is almost certainly that some user are not using Adobe Reader or Acrobat to complete and save the Forms. The most recent version of Foxit Reader happens to be a PDF viewer that works relatively well with PDF forms, but programs such as Preview on the Mac have very limited support for forms. I'd be surprised if you saw this behavior from a PDF that was saved with Reader.

D

dblancard

Participant

We are having the same issue, but ALL fields on a large-ish form. Also this form was widely distributed for email responses - so re-distributing it will be challenge.

We are using Acrobat 9.10 with livecycle to create/publish. All works well, except that we are getting occasional returns where all data is hidden, unless we 'click' inside the field - then it appears. If we export data it is empty.

I cannot see any pattern re: version of acrobat reader or Mac vs. PC that the recipients are using.

This is a serious issue for us, and any help would be greatly appreciated.

Dave B.

Toronto.

~graffiti

Legend

I wish I had an answer for you but I do have some information that you may be interested in.

Your licensing only allows 500 uses per form so, a "wide" distribution would probably be in violation of the EULA and would put you at risk. Be sure and study up on the EULA before continuing down that path.

M

MCHCAH

Participating Frequently

I also have the same problem but not on every field. The 2nd and 3rd rows of the form can be filled in, and remain as does the name, and date, but other rows in the form have the same problem as above and cannot be printed. When you put the cursor on the field, the correct data does show up, but when the cursor is moved, its gone again. i am using Adobe Professional 9.0.

~graffiti

Legend

Do you know what the people that are filling in the form are using? This seems to be common occurance when they are using something other than Adobe Reader to fill it out (Mac Preview for example).

M

MCHCAH

Participating Frequently

I'm actually filling it out using Adobe Professional 9.0. I then send the filled out time sheet that I created to someone else. It works if I only have two lines on the sheet (2nd and 3rd rows) but sometimes have more and thus the problem. I can't see any difference in the other lines on the form. Seems like this shouldn't be a problem.

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