Selecting text to turn into fillable text field

Question

I am posting here because I just can't seem to find a definitive answer. I am in the prepare form section and I would like to select existing text and turn that into a fillable text field. From my findings, I don't think there is a way to do this and I will need to add my own text field manually and change the default value to display the text I want it to say. Honestly what would make sense in my head is selecting text, right click it and have an option to turn into a fillable text field. Figured I would post here just in case. Lol thanks for any help while I start manually do this.

another thing that could help and the whole reason I have to re do this pdf is when I tried to add a new paragraph of text, all of the formatting went out the window. The text would not automatically move down for some reason so I figured I would just open the new one I created in word with the added paragraph and quickly add the fillable sections of text back... but it has not been quick. Thanks for any help!

try67 · Answer

- No, there's no automatic way to do it like that. What can be done, though, is to add a Highlight comment (or something similar) over the text, and then use a script to replace those comments with fields. It could even be possible to copy the selected text as the fields' default values, if that's what you want to happen.

- This is a common mistake about PDF files. They were never meant to be edited in such a way, and trying to do so (although technically possible) is always going to be difficult, and often nearly impossible. They won't "re-flow" by themselves, nor will content be pushed down to the next page for you. You have to do it all manually, and it often goes wrong, as you've seen. The best workflow is to edit the original file, then create a new PDF file from it.

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