Form fields doubling...?

Report · Jun 04, 2018

I have been having a hell of a time getting our forms put back together in Acrobat Pro DC. Besides the well known iOS issues, I now have some of our forms going out with double fields. For instance, I will have a plain text field named "Description_01" I will finish up the document, send it out to our techs, then when the document comes back printing is a nightmare because the text will be blurred around. I started looking into the problem and set a hard font size for that box, also set so that long lines will not scroll. That fixed many of the issues, but when you printed it, the text would appear bold. I went back into editing and found out that for some reason, some of my text fields had doubled. In edit, it looks normal, but if you click on the field and drag the box, there is another copy of the exact same field right below it. How does that even happen?

I

This was from a simple area of the form. This kind of stuff is coming in on a semi regular basis. There is a software hiccup somewhere.

Report · Nov 13, 2020

Having the same problem. Making adjustments to a form another designer created. Every time I move a form field up or down using the arrow keys it duplicates itself. Some fieds suddenly have 3 copies. Real pain.

Report · Jan 13, 2025

I have this trouble occasionally when someone emails me a form they've completed. It's a form that I created, and I *KNOW* for a fact that the original form does not have duplicated fields or fields with identical names as I'm very careful when creating fillable forms not to do either of those things. I've found that, if I go through and delete the text in every field that has doubling/shadow duplication, save the file, then save it again as an optimized PDF with form fields flattened (which I need to do before uploading it for signatures anyway), the form displays and prints as one would expect it to, without the doubled ghost text. However, if you save it as an optimized document with flattened fields *before* deleting the text, it will display both sets of text (making it unreadable). In fact, this is how I usually find out that this issue exists. I suspect that in these cases, the form is being filled out in some third party application that is somehow breaking the form by duplicating every field that is typed into. The latest one I received shows the PDF Producer as "iOS Version 17.6.1 (Build 21G93) Quartz PDFContext" so I'm assuming this person filled it out on their iPhone or iPad or similar Apple product. I've attached a screenshot of the most recent instance of this (the red blockouts are where the student's name, phone number, and email address are). Interestingly, the signature field is the only field which doesn't show this weird duplication.