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R
ramseym37607947
Participating Frequently
April 22, 2016
Question

Adobe Acrobat - Hiding Text Field In PDF With Java Script

  • April 22, 2016
  • 1 reply
  • 3951 views

I have a PDF that I'm making fill-able in Acrobat. There's a coment section, where I'm doing a multi-line text field. The PDF already has horizontal lines on it for filling it out by hand.

What I want to do is have a text field over this with a white background, so that when you fill it in on a PC the horizontal lines don't show up.But I still want people to be able to fill this out by hand after they print it if they want. So if this field is left empty I want to set it to be invisible/hidden, so that when you print it the lines would be there for writing stuff in.

I've found various forums saying this is possible with the following java script:

if(this.rawValue == null)

{ 

this.presence = "hidden";

} 

But it doesn't seem to be working.

Can anyone who knows how to do this walk me through it step by step? Maybe I'm doing it wrong. I have Acrobat X Pro and Livecycle Designer ES2, but don't know if I need to do this in designer.

Thank you.

This topic has been closed for replies.

1 reply

G
gkaiseril
Inspiring
April 22, 2016

The code sample you are providing is for LiveCycle only and cannot be entered into any action in a form created with Acrobat.

With the form open, have you looked at the JavaScript console to see if there are any errors?

R
ramseym37607947Author
Participating Frequently
April 22, 2016

Is there any way to do this in Acrobat alone? I can use LiveCycle but I have a lot of PDF's to convert to fillable and it will take a bit longer If I have to edit each one with LiveCycle. I see there are ways to insert Javascript in acrobat but it seems to be in validation and calculation properties tabs for fields.

I did not notice any errors before but I will check again, thanks.

G
gkaiseril
Inspiring
April 22, 2016

The following should work:

event.target.display = display.visible;

if(event.value == "")

{

event.target.display = display.hidden;

}

If you conditionally  hide the form field, you may need to make the field visible at sometime. I prefer to force the field to visible and then let the conditional statement hide it if needed.

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