How to select a group of preprinted boxes on a form to also be OCR-able field(s)?

I have a 3rd party pre-printed document to scan and set up (using Acrobat Pro 2017) as an Acrobat form, which then is to be emailed to a specific group of people, who will be requested to use Adobe Reader to open, complete and save that form, then return it to me, after which I am to collect and store copies of the data on those forms and then send the completed forms back to the 3rd party that requested the information. 

It's pretty clear the sender expects responders will fill out these forms manually and therefore intends to OCR the completed forms, because the form document is comprised of small blank boxes for every character of the requested information (first, middle, last name, address, etc.) and states that each character must be printed as a capital letter within the border of the appropriate box and that no box may include more than one character.

So, I know I can't really mess with the visual layout of the form and that I'll need to make sure the character by character data shows up on the completed form in the location where a responder would place it if doing it by hand. 

I have manually created a few Acrobat forms in the past, but never anything requiring compliance with anything like these sorts of "little boxes"!  The thought of trying to individually create fields to in some manner use and respect the boundaries of these "little boxes" is overwhelming.

So I would really appreciate suggestions about how I might be able to automate dealing with all these little boxes using Acrobat Pro. 

For example, is there a way Acrobat Pro will allow me to automate this chore by perhaps somehow selecting a group of those predrawn boxes (say, the 20 or so provided for spelling out the person's last name) and then cause Acrobat Pro to do something like either: 

1.  Make that area into a single field for LastName that also causes the characters placed into it to be spaced so they will appear to have been filled-in box by box; or

2.  Perhaps make that area into 20 one-character fields, each being properly sized & within the confines of the predrawn borders of one of those boxes, and being named something like LastName.0.0 through LastName.0.19?  (with the intention of aggregating those all into a single "LastName" field when the data is later collected.)

I tried creating a single field inside the first box of such a series and then using "Create Multiple Fields" to try to do what's described in #2.  That seemed to handle both the field naming and maintaining the size and basic format of the multiple fields just fine.  However, I couldn't figure out how to automate the spacing/location of those fields and I've learned that manually repositioning those fields to conform to the locations of the predrawn boxes takes forever.

Plus, it seems like it would be preferable to have all the characters of "LastName" in a single field, rather than 20, if that can be automated in some manner. 

Thanks in advance.