Importing Interactive Forms and Buttons into new/other PDFs in Acrobat

[GL11558]

Hi all!

I work with typesetting of translated InDesign files and sometimes I got interactive PDF sources with forms and buttons created only in Acrobat. The translation should match 100% the source PDF visual, so I end up copying and pasting all forms and buttons page by page, manually.

I know there's the "replace pages" trick, but it isn't great for this case as it always retains not only the form fields, but also the hyperlinks. Even if I delete the hyperlinks, it will still not be helpful as the replace pages don't bring hyperlinks with the new translated content! So this method can be dangerous as the translated PDF may contain hyperlinks to the localized web pages, in other words, they need to stay as they are.

Is there any way or script to copy/import all the interactive buttons and forms (only, not hyperlinks) to the new translated PDF?

Acrobat doesn't really seem to have a native way to do so. The Prepare Form mode only allows to "Create Multiple Copies..." within the same document, and even if I try to temporarily combine both source and target PDF, it would still be time-consuming and even slower than manually copying and pasting as I would have to set each page from an to, moreover, the fields would not retain the original name, and for translation, this is a must, as some javascript action relies on the original field name.

So this is a big challenge! Hoping that copy and paste isn't the only solution for now.

TIA

[Karl Heinz Kremer]

You can write a script that looks at your form field elemements and then recreates them on a new page. There is however one serious limitation: From a script, you cannot access any script properties of those fields, so that information would be lost. A custom plug-in would be able to do that.

If this is something you need to do a lot, maybe paying for custom plug-in development might be the soltion. . 

[GL11558]

Hi Karl, thank you for your suggestion. The issue here is that the target translated PDF must match 100% the source. The script would have to be super versatile and able to handle a recreation to match exactly the source. As the client PDFs may vary a lot, and could be simple or super complex coding for all possibilities of fields (calculate, validate, format, actions). Recreating fields may not be the best approach as, if I'm not wrong, you cannot recreate a button with JavaScript actions built on it. I'm not sure if this is even possible.

What I was thinking, the only issue with using the "Replace Pages" for translated PDFs, is that it not only retains the unwanted old source hyperlinks, but does not pull the new localised ones. A javascript for it seems more achievable.

If you or anyone else could explain to me how a tailored javascript purchase works and tell me how much it would cost I appreciate it. I don't want to waste anyone's time and of course spending without being sure this approach could even be possible. 

This is actually a common issue, millions of PDFs are translated every day and people need to struggle with interactive PDF issues that have limited handling.

[try67]

This is indeed a common issue in the translation/DTP industry. The solution is usually to make these updates in the source document, before converting it to a PDF, as a part of the localization of the file. Doing it once you have a PDF file requires much more work, as you've seen.