automatic form-recognition

[FieryPantone]

"Acrobat will automatically analyse your document and add form fields."

The obvious question – what will it look for? I've tried tried several times with a Word file that looks like a form, and Acrobat recognises almost nothing as a form field. Worse, it recognises a few things that aren't form files, such as table headers …

Advice welcome!

[BarlaeDC]

Hi,

Without sharing the document it would be hard for us to say why the automatic feature is not working as you expect, if you can share the document we can provide additional input?

Although there is always the option of adding the fields manually, this is more time consuming but it does make sure you get all the fields you want.

Regards

Malcolm

[try67]

There's no real answer for that, as we don't exactly know the algorithm used by Adobe for this. Generally speaking it seems to rely on the shape of elements on the page: boxes, lines, etc. But that might depend a lot on the font used, the size of those elements, their location, etc. We do know it's almost never 100% accurate (sometimes much less) and requires some manual tweaking after the fact.

However, there is a way to get 100% accurate results, by using a script and some set-up in advance of how the file is built.

I've developed two (paid-for) tools that can recognize specific characters and convert them to their matching form fields: Underscores to text fields and specific Wingdings characters to check-boxes or radio-buttons. You can find them here:

https://try67.blogspot.com/2020/04/acrobatreader-convert-underscores-to.html

http://try67.blogspot.com/2015/09/acrobatreader-convert-wingdings-to.html

[JR Boulay]

Go to this page and watch Episodes 52 and 53.

They will learn you how to create "Acrobat friendly" forms.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-indesigner/id96779509