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Anonymous

Answered

Help: Text duplicates in all form fields

Forum|Forum|12 years ago
February 21, 2013
8 replies
158803 views

When filling in the PDF form fields (of the PDF fillable form that I created), the text duplicates into every other field in the PDF, regardless of which box you type into. Help?

PDF forms

Correct answer try67

This can be done with a script or a stand-alone tool, but it has some limitations.

I've developed a set of (paid-for) tools that allow you to do it.

See: https://www.try67.com/tool/easily-rename-pdf-fields

If you don't care what the new field names are, and just want them to be unique, you can use this other (paid-for) tool I've created, which will automatically rename all duplicate fields so that they have unique names:

https://www.try67.com/tool/acrobat-rename-duplicate-fields-to-unique-fields

kareemwill

Participating Frequently

As george said, I edited each of the names for the boxes. I thought it would take extra long, but i realized that after i typed the new name and clicked enter, it would automatically jump to the next selection/text box. This allowed me to simply change the names in succession without having to click and select each one individually. I used "1, 2, 3... etc" as names to make them all unique.

kareemwill

Participating Frequently

this is what it looked like on my end. i just typed and pressed enter after editing each new name

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Teresa-SC

New Participant

That is almost the same thing I did. I left the name that Adobe gave the fields and I just added a number to the end (without a space). Mine was a little more complicated but easy to fix. The complicated part was I have a form for each course an instructor teaches. The top part I type in the school name, school year, course name, course prefix and course number. When an instructors teaches more than one course, example teaching three courses, I first named the form Course Form 1, a copy Course Form 2, and another copy Course Form 3. Then in the Course Form 1 I added a 1 to the end of each field name. There are a bunch of Yes/No checkboxes so the first Yes1.1 and first No1.1; the second Yes1.2 and second No1.2; and so on. I did the same for Course Form 2 but the first Yes2.1 and first No2.1; the second Yes2.2 and second No2.2; and so one. Now all I have to do is type in the top part and combine the number of Course Forms for the instructor to fill out based on the number of courses they are teaching. This is working for me.

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Jade331166474nvq

New Participant

This worked for me, thank you!

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jozette annet86151961

New Participant

Just spent hours manually renaming form fields across 30 pages. Thanks for nothing, Adobe.

try67

Community Expert

You could have done it in under 10 seconds with my tool, linked to above...

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Jshack1018

New Participant

Nobody wants to pay extra for the absolute most basic feature that should already be in the program to begin with. Shill.

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defaultbd6pmll90h9n

New Participant

What if you have 200-300 boxes on the form? Is there an easier way to change all of the names rather than one at a time?

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Test Screen Name

Legend

It may be worth a few words about WHY the expectation is that we have unique field names. Forms were designed to be filled and submitted. When a form is submitted, each field sends its name and value. So, if fields have the same name it is impossible to know how the form is filled in.

Similarly, forms can be filled automatically. This is done using a similar file listing field name + value. When loading the form, Acrobat MUST fill in all the fields with the same name at the same time, as it has no way to know which one you mean. This also is a useful way to repeat info, such as the client's name on each part of a form.

Sometimes today forms are made to only print, or to be sent (complete) for printing. (This was not even possible in older versions of the software). There is no special rule for this case, you still need to make each field name unique, even if there are thousands of them.

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LottieGuhl

Inspiring

This makes sense, however why does Adobe create duplicate form boxes? Mine are all labelled differently - they show as Topics and Notes#0, Topics and Notes#1 etc in the field list. However, they are all duplicates - I have to go into the properties of the form field and change the names there. It would save a ton of problems to automatically create unique form field name properties (especially since I didn't catch this problem before creating 15 documents with dozens of form fields in each document). If, for some reason, someone wanted a duplicate form field that could be set up as a separate option.

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Lisa5ECF

New Participant

I'm having this issue also, and all the fields are titled something different. Any other ideas?

try67

Community Expert

You'll need to share the file with us for more help with it.

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Lisa5ECF

New Participant

Well, I went back in to edit/prepare the form, and now I see what is meant by the "titles" and they were all the same. I'm trying to prepare a set of lab tables for my high school students, but there are 2 tables with 25 cells each, along with many other cells for longer answers. It's sounding like I either rename all the cells individually (even with just a number, which they won't see or I don't care if they see), or have them use a different program.

paulf50072823

New Participant

Totally it! Assign them different names and boom, fixed. George is right!

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cannady

New Participant

It would be great if Adobe DC, not Reader would provide a way to fill a table in a form with auto-incremented field names for each row in a column. For example the columns would be Product, Serial and Expiration Date and there would be 10 rows of duplicate fields named for each of the columns incremented by 1. Product01, Product02, etc. Detection of a table might require a rudimentary table creation feature.

try67

Community Expert

You can do that using the Create Multiple Fields command. Create the first row of the table, select all the fields (in Edit Form mode), then right-click one of them and select this command. Enter the number of fields to create, play around with the offset settings and when you click OK it will generate uniquely named copies of the original fields.

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T_Hunter

Participating Frequently

I have this same problem in Acrobat DC and changing the field names has not solved the problem. I've deleted the boxes and recreated them, but still have the problem. Ideas?

Bernd Alheit

Community Expert

Can you share the form?

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T_Hunter

Participating Frequently

It’s a work in progress and I’m a novice, but here you go...

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George_Johnson

Inspiring

This is how PDF forms behave if the fields names are the same, so you just need to change their names in Acrobat so they are all different.

Gustavo.Macias

New Participant

k...but, how? 😕😕

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Test Screen Name

Legend

Select each form field in turn in the Form editor, click on Propertioes, change the name. Repeat for each field, whether there are 10 fields or 10,000 fields.

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