Is there a fix to merging of text boxes yet?

Question

I've searched previous posts and not found anything useful, logical or coherent that can make any sense of the issue - and before anyone chimes in with the "PDF's aren't meant to be edited this way" hokum, first answer the question of why the text box function exists in the first place, or check boxes, or any form tools at all for that matter.

I have tried every trick recommended on this forum and elsewhere imaginable, and unimaginable - short of making each text box an image file.

Is there a work-around or a legitimate and actual fix for the incessant merging of text fields within a form during the form creation process?

Thom Parker · Answer

You're mixing up different things. Interactive form fields (text, checkboxes etc.) are for collecting data from the user and do not merge. In fact, they are a completely different kind of thing from the text areas that do merge.

The merging text fields, or text boxes, that people complain about are misnamed. This text is part of the page content and the boxed text shown in PDF Edit mode is a collection of one or more "text runs". When Acrobat is placed in PDF Edit mode (not Form edit mode), Acrobat analyzes the page text and tries to put related text runs together for your editing convenience. Acrobat is guessing because unless the document content is properly tagged, there is no information in the document about what text runs actually belong together.

I have to agree this situation is non-optimal. However, you would be really unhappy if edit mode displayed the individual text runs. And I am sure that you understand the massive difficulty of creating an algorithm for parsing random text into a sensible structure.

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