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Participant
March 31, 2022
Answered

Duplicate Radio Button Choice on multiple Pages

  • March 31, 2022
  • 3 replies
  • 3857 views

Hello,

 

I would like to know if it is possible to create "repeating" radio buttons in Adobe Acrobat Pro. I have a PDF with multiple pages that needs to be filled out. The first section is the gender.

 

First I created a group and put 2 choices in (male and female). Afterwards I duplicated the group using the "duplicate across pages" function. The problem is, that if I select "male" on page one, on page two, the radio buttons ar still not checked.

 

With a text field this is no problem. I duplicated the text field "name" from the frist page to the second. If I write a name in the field on page 1, it automatically transfers the same name onto page 2. Is this possible somehow with radiobuttons?

This topic has been closed for replies.
Correct answer therealzsr

Ok, so I found the solutions by myself now with the help of @try67 s answer.

The problem was, that I had a separat group for each page.

 

What you want to do in order for this to work is as follows:

1. Create group of radio buttons on page one

2. Place your radio buttons and name them

3. Copy radio buttons to page 2, but make sure they are still in the group of page one, and name them the same.

So for example in my group on page one I have as follows:

male, female, male, female, male, female (the first pair of "male/female" is placed on page one, the second pair, on page two and so forth. Then, when you check the option "are selected in unison", if on page 1 you select male, on all other pages male will be selected as well).

 

Kinda wierd that there is no exact explanation for this on the official Adobe webpage - anyway, thanks to everybody for their input, which ultimately resulted in me figuring out what the problem was!

 

3 replies

Participant
June 4, 2026

I did have to actually go back after I duplicated across the pages and rename (edit the group name again on ALL of the pages) so that they were all without the extra page number etc.  And then - it worked!!

Meenakshi0101
Community Manager
Community Manager
June 4, 2026

Hi MWSB COO,

 

Thank you for sharing your findings. Glad to know it worked.

This will help others with similar behaviour.

 

Let us know if we can be of any help.

 

Thanks,

Meenakshi

 

try67
Community Expert
Community Expert
April 1, 2022

Go to the Properties of the fields and tick this box under the Options tab:

 

 

Participant
April 1, 2022

Thank you, but this still does not solve the issue. Either its a bug in Acrobat or its just not meant to be. I changed this option for each group across the pages AND also for each individual item. Still, if on page 1 I select "male", on page 3 and 4, nothing is selected and I can choose whichever option I want, without it changing on page 1... I think this option is meant only for items within the same group, but not across pages... 

 

Until there is another answer, I will try this with checkboxes, maybe this will work somehow. Thank you anyway for the reply.

therealzsrAuthorCorrect answer
Participant
April 1, 2022

Ok, so I found the solutions by myself now with the help of @try67 s answer.

The problem was, that I had a separat group for each page.

 

What you want to do in order for this to work is as follows:

1. Create group of radio buttons on page one

2. Place your radio buttons and name them

3. Copy radio buttons to page 2, but make sure they are still in the group of page one, and name them the same.

So for example in my group on page one I have as follows:

male, female, male, female, male, female (the first pair of "male/female" is placed on page one, the second pair, on page two and so forth. Then, when you check the option "are selected in unison", if on page 1 you select male, on all other pages male will be selected as well).

 

Kinda wierd that there is no exact explanation for this on the official Adobe webpage - anyway, thanks to everybody for their input, which ultimately resulted in me figuring out what the problem was!

 

AkanchhaS8194121
Legend
April 1, 2022

Hi Richard,

 

Hope you are doing well.

As described above, the form filed duplicated across other pages works fine but the checkboxes don't.

 

Would you mind checking the name of the Checkboxes filed across pages? If it's duplicated, then it should have the same name as the form filed to duplicate the data as well. 

 

To understand more about PDF forms, you can go through this article here: https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/pdf-form-field-properties.html

 

Thanks,

Akanchha 

Participant
April 1, 2022

Hello Akanchha,

 

thank you for your reply, but this does not really cover my issue. As said, I am working with radio buttons not checkboxes (have not tried this yet, but if it is the only option, I will go with this). The tempalte I created previously in illustrator has circles in it, this is why I chose radio buttons (in a printed version the customer could cross the circle - to have a consistent tamplate I wanted to stick to the "circle", so therefore I chose radio buttons).

 

Yes, I checked and the names across the pages are as follows:

Page 1: Group name "Anrede.p1(1).p0" (insde the group I have male and female, without any ending of some sort, like "p0" or anything)

Page 3: Group name "Anrede.p1(1).p2" (same as above)

Page 4: Group name "Anrede.p1(1).p3" (same as above).

Note: The group name ending beginning with ".p1..." was automatically added by Adobe Acrobat, I did not change this, only the original group name "Anrede" was set by me.

 

Hope this clarifies my issue!

Participant
April 1, 2022

Additional information: The names for the text fields are not the same across the pages and still they get duplicated. For example, on page 1 the name is "Vorname#0" on page 3 the name is "Vorname#1" and so forth. I have already tried renaming the groups of radio buttons with "#" instead of the other name that was chose by Acrobat, but this also did not solve my issue. Hope this helps as well!