Fillable form fields and buttons looks and acts different in Acrobat Reader versus Acrobat Pro

[Angela28542446q8d3]

A fillable form created in InDesign appears as intended in Acrobat Pro (most current version), customized radio buttons and check boxes that fill with a red square, and text fields in light cyan. But when opened in Acrobat Reader (most current version), the interactive elements appear and behave like the uncustomized version, i.e.

• radio buttons fill with dots

• check boxes show check marks

• text fields are highlighted in a default blue

See the screen captures of both A-Pro and A-Reader views for comparison. 

How can this discrepancy be corrected to make the PDF opened in Acrobat Reader (used by the majority) appear as intended?  Is there a setting in InDesign when creating the PDF? or perhaps a default in Reader that can be edited? I can't find anything related and am stumped as to next steps -- any insight would be most appreciated!

 Created on Mac OS 12.6.3, InDesign 17.4.1

[Bernd Alheit]

Create the form fields in Adobe Acrobat. 

[Angela28542446q8d3]

Thanks for your suggestion. Recreating the form fields in Acrobat is labour-intensive, especially as they need to be re-done if changes are made to the original file.

But good news!!!! I did find a default setting in Reader that removes the unwanted highlights.

Go to Preferences > Forms > Highlight Color -- uncheck the option to "Show border hover color for fields"

[Thom Parker · Accepted solution]

Yes, field highlighting seems to always be an issue. It's enabled by default. Don't mistake this for some kind of unusual behavior. It's totally normal.

It is unfortunate that InDesign creates alternate appearances for form fields, because these alternate appearances don't really exist. There is a set of appearances  defined in the PDF spec, and this is all you get.  It is the prerogative of the viewer to change these appearances any time it becomes necessary to redraw the field. This usually only occurs at design time, but there are no guarentees. 

[Angela28542446q8d3]

Thanks for your insights, Thom. I guess this means going with default appearances is the path of least frustration, until customization is better integrated. Sigh.

[Thom Parker · Accepted solution]

It is unlikely to ever change.

When you create the PDF from InDesign, a number of appearnces are pre-made. The On appearnce, the Off appearance, and the Up and Down (button press) appeances for each.  So in theory the PDF viewer should never need to re-create theses appearances, it just uses whatever one it needs. But if a design change is made, then these appearances do need to be recreated. The tool doing this has no knowledge of your design, so it has to go with a default. There is also the case where an appeanace is missing. In this case, all of them could be redrawn. There is also the case where the form field has it's redraw flag set, basically asking to be redrawn. I don't know if this is the issue with InDesign. But in the end, the viewer can just decide to do it.