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Alliosaaa
Alliosaaa
Inspiring
August 16, 2016
Question

Tab Order Changes After Switching to Preview

  • August 16, 2016
  • 5 replies
  • 2003 views

Hello,

I am using Adobe Acrobat Pro DC to create numerous PDF forms for my company. A good majority of my work day involves working with Acrobat. After upgrading to DC recently, my tab order NEVER stays put. I'll spend 10 minutes arranging a section of fields, then as soon as I hit "Preview", the order is completely screwed up. Returning to the Edit screen shows the order in shambles again. So I spend another 10 minutes re-arranging the same section, and hit Preview again. The order has scattered once again. It usually takes 3 or 4 tries of doing this until the tab order is "locked" in place and results in me wasting an ungodly amount of time.

I do have my tab order set to Manual and have unchecked the "Automatically adjust tab order when modifying fields" box in preferences. This has done absolutely nothing.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated! I am incredibly sick of dragging fields around when my time could spend elsewhere.

Thank you!!

    This topic has been closed for replies.

    5 replies

    silviek47136931
    silviek47136931
    Participant
    May 17, 2018

    Hi all,

    I'm having the same issue. We are working with >30 forms a day with around 1000 text fields and check boxes per form.. the manually replacing them is doing my head in. Only thing that seems to work is manually re-ordering them one by one instead of per group.

    Hope Adobe has a solution?

    angelinac62664648
    angelinac62664648
    Participant
    January 23, 2017

    Hey JoeAlosa and all,

    Has this issue ever been resolved?

    I just started this job and what it entails is the same as JoeAlosa. I have several different forms to create with text fields. Some with 100 text fields, some with only 5, depending on the project. The tabs have to be in a specific order for the end user. I set this in InDesign CC17 along with whatever needs to be set in the Buttons tab, then I Export as an Interactive PDF. When I bring it into Acrobat Pro DC, tab order changes. Show Tab Numbers and Text Field order are totally out of wack. I tried all your suggestions below. Nothing works other than manually moving each Text Field to its proper order. Again the problem with this, is having a 100 or more text fields to move while working with multiple pages with these text fields, just as JoeAlosa had also said.

    I'm working with Windows 10, InDesign CC17, Acrobat Pro DC

    Please help. We can't possibly be the only two people having this issue.

      J
      jenniferk2575127
      Participant
      October 19, 2016

      I am having this identical issue. I will happily report as a bug; can someone please direct me how to do that? Sorry, not a regular Adobe user.

      B
      Adobe Employee
      BhavnaNegi
      Adobe Employee
      October 19, 2016

      Dear Jennifer The issue as observed by you (and others) is already noted in our backlog and we have our engineering investigating already. The work around here is that – instead of moving multiple selected fields in fields panel to re-order tab order, please try single fields move action. Although not an ideal situation in case wherein you have many number of fields to re-order, but I hope it helps. We might have a fix for the issue in upcoming future releases.

      G
      gkaiseril
      Inspiring
      August 16, 2016

      Make sure you have updated your version of Acrobat.

      I would save the form prior to opening "Preview". This will write the current file in memory to your disk drive. Now try Preview. If it changes the tab order, close the open PDF without saving and then open saved disk file.

      If there is still an issue, I would run the "Repair" option under Acrobat's Help.

      If this still persist report as a bug.

      Alliosaaa
      AlliosaaaAuthor
      Inspiring
      August 17, 2016

      I am using the current version and get automatic updates. Unfortunately, saving doesn't do anything to help... which is very confusing. I have not yet tried repairing but that will be my next attempt to fix this silly problem. Thank you for the advice!

      G
      George_Johnson
      Inspiring
      August 16, 2016

      What happens if you don't use preview and instead just close form editing mode? If you enable keyboard accelerators in preferences, you can toggle between form editing and normal mode by pressing the A key.

      Alliosaaa
      AlliosaaaAuthor
      Inspiring
      August 16, 2016

      That seemed to be working and I had very high hopes that it fixed the problem, but alas, it did not. Still ordering and reordering over and over again with no rhyme or reason. I feel like I'm stuck in a time warp.

      G
      George_Johnson
      Inspiring
      August 16, 2016

      Strange. I'll do some testing to see if I can find anything useful to report.

      What OS are you using?

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