Adobe forms fields disappear

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
March 26, 2024
2 replies
3761 views

Hello, I'm using Adobe Acrobat DC for business and I've created a form that works fine when it is first opened. The user is able to fill in all form fields. But then when it is sent back to me, most of those form fields are missing. It can be very frustrating - I can see the filled form fields in the preview, but when opening the document they are gone. How do I get this corrected? I've attached some photos.

PDF forms

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JR Boulay

Community Expert

You've fallen victim to the phantom field bug.

Open the "Prepare form" tools pane, click in the "More" menu and choose "Prepare form for e-signing", and then do the opposite by choosing "Revert to Acrobat form" at the same place.

It's magical!

Acrobate du PDF, InDesigner et Photoshopographe

Thom Parker

Community Expert

Excellent work around JR (I hesitate to call this a hack, but you know, if it looks like a duck)!!

Forcing Acrobat to rebuild the field structure!!

Thom Parker - Software Developer at PDFScriptingUse the Acrobat JavaScript Reference early and often

Thom Parker

Community Expert

How did the user fill the form? Did they use Acrobat Reader, or fill it in a browser?

Thom Parker - Software Developer at PDFScriptingUse the Acrobat JavaScript Reference early and often

S

sweeneysueAuthor

Participating Frequently

Thank you. The same program, Adobe Acrobat DC. We all carry the same version of Adobe. I've attached the original unfilled document. This happens all of the time with this doc, would love to get to the bottom of it.

Accident_Incident_Investigation_Report_rev0822.pdf

Thom Parker

Community Expert

There is nothing obviously wrong with the PDF. Can you post a filled form that has the missing fields. That would be more helpful to look at.

The most common issue with fields that are filled but don't show data is that the field appearance was not generated when the field value changed. This is an artifact of 3rd party PDF viewers that ignore the PDF spec and generate the appearance dynamically. Which is why you would see the field value in the preview.

A manual fix is to open the field properties and change something like the border color. This forces Acrobat to generate the appearance using the current value.

Thom Parker - Software Developer at PDFScriptingUse the Acrobat JavaScript Reference early and often

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