How can I make smiley icons visible or invisible by clicking them in a PDF form?

Hi there! 😊

What you're working on sounds like such a creative and helpful idea and yes, it’s definitely possible to do something like this in Adobe Acrobat! The simplest way would be to use interactive buttons in place of the smiley icons. With a little setup, you can make them clickable so that one click shows the smiley, and another click hides it again. You don’t need any advanced coding just set each smiley as a button image, and toggle their visibility using the built-in options Adobe provides for form fields.

This can be a great solution for giving quick, visual feedback without dropdowns or checkboxes especially for preschool teachers who need fast and clear tools.

On a related note, I’ve been working in early childhood education for over 7 years mainly creating learning materials for preschoolers. While your work supports the teachers directly, I was focused more on engaging the kids. That’s how I got into free printable letter coloring pages(coloringfull.com). I used to print them from different websites offering free PDFs, and they really helped the kids stay focused, become more creative, and reduce screen time.

If you're ever putting together a full resource pack for classrooms, adding some simple printable coloring pages can be a fun and educational bonus. It really helped in my experience, and I think it could do the same for others too!

Use a button field with the layout in the options tab set to Icon Only.  Load the image then enter this simply script as a Mouse Up action:

if(event.target.buttonPosition==0)
{event.target.buttonPosition=1}
else
{event.target.buttonPosition=0}

The script will show/hide the icon when it is clicked.  To rotate through multiple icons with each click follow the instructions in this article:

https://pdfautomationstation.substack.com/p/how-to-build-a-pdf-button-image-carousel

> Can this be done using interactive form fields, buttons, or scripts?

All of the above.

You can do it in a couple of ways:

- Create overlapping button fields, one with an image and one without, and show/hide them when the user clicks one. This can be done using a script, or even using the built-in Show/Hide a Field command, if set up properly.

- Use a single button and copy the icon to it (either the smiley face, or an empty image) from a set of (hidden) button fields each time the user clicks. This requires using a script.

Just be aware that this is not real "user input". You won't be able to export it to an Excel file for further analysis later on, for example, as the state of a button is not a value.