how to rotate a text box?

[luisinfante1955]

Help F1 Instructions say to place the pointer on the selection control area and wait until the pointer changes to a rotating icon, but it never does. Can somebody help me?.

[try67]

What kind of text box, exactly? How are you adding it?

[luisinfante1955]

Thank you Gilad. It is a text box from Comments/Drawing tools. It belongs to the geometric figures set titled "Drawing Marks". I click the text box icon, drag a rectangled area and double click in it to edit text inside the box. I badly need to rotate it. My Acrobat is XI Pro 11.0.07, W7 Pro 64bit.

[try67]

This kind of box can't be rotated in such a way. You can rotate text that you add using the Add Text tool under Tools - Content Editing, though.

[luisinfante1955]

Thank you Gilad. Very kind of you. I could rotate text from Add Text Tool, as you suggest but such a text does not have background colors.

Let me explain my need: I have a figure with vertical text tags (boxes) created in MWord. Such vertical text boxes are in Spanish language and I am translating them to English one.  So, I need vertical text boxes, white background colored, to be located just above the original one, hidding it and covering it with the new language.

By using Add Text Tool for this application one would need to steps: firstly to cover the original text with an empty text box (or rectangle), white backgrounded, and secondly Add Text Tool.

Acrobat should do it just as MSWord does: Create a formatable Text Box and Rotate it as desired.

For your kind information, what I am sucessfully doing now is this: rotate 90° the whole document and next create Text boxes (horizontal). Clumpsy, but it hits the target, keeping low the file size.

[try67 · Accepted solution]

It is a VERY bad idea to try to translate a PDF document directly in Acrobat. I recommend you look for another way of doing it, preferably in a Microsoft Word, if that's the original file format used to create the PDF.

And don't expect Acrobat to provide you with the same functionalities as Word does. The two are very different and serve different purposes. Acrobat is NOT a word processing application (even though it has some tools that can perform such tasks).

If you have to do it in Acrobat and only want to rotate the texts in 90 degree intervals you could use form fields, by the way...

[luisinfante1955]

You bet. I am going back to Word and will let you know latter on. Thanks for supporting me Gilad.

I was getting familiar with Acrobat Pro XI while doing this job. Things have changed quite a bit since Acrobat 8, my previous version. I was inadvertendly translating this pdf, but in fact I have to revise the text also, so Word is the one.

I unsucessfully tryed to rotate Form Filed Text. Is there any hint for?.

[try67]

You can rotate the text in the field, not the field itself. You'll find

this setting under Properties - General - Orientation.

On Wed, Jun 11, 2014 at 6:55 PM, luisinfante1955 <forums_noreply@adobe.com>

[luisinfante1955]

Thank you Gilad.

[Monmi Cybro]

Thanks for your question.  Was exactly what I was looking for.  I wanted to add a note to @AdobeDCPro about this.  I spent way too much time trying to track this down.  This program should not be so complicated to rotate a text box and why have two different text boxes anyway? You don't offer a tool set for Architect and designers so we have to improvise when a firm forces to used this not so good program.  I prefer Bluebeam as they are much more user friendly(no subscription and cheaper) and have a tool set for architect and designer to review PDF's and comment.  I will never buy adobe for that reason and am trying to get my firm to change to blue beam.  This was frustrating, a waste of time and still no fix in sight.  I tried finding the vertical text but can't find it again and when I click to select the text all the options in the tools go grey and I can't edit the text. Its like a selection game of pick the box and pick the tool but click the box again because everything went grey and so on... Oh and if I copy paste something from one PDF to another for whatever reason it decides to rotate it all on its own(when I don't need it rotated)... explain that one.

I know this forum was not for my rant but maybe they will read this and change things. Haha!