Need to add some text fillable form fields

[Juan Cano]

My hate-hate relationship with Acrobat continues.

Imagine you have a PDF that is really long, and there's one page that is blank, and you need to add a fillable field so you can send it out and people that get it can input text.

I can't/don't want to scan the doc to create form fields because a) is a giant PDF and only 10 pages need for fields b) those pages are blank so it wouldn't find anything to make a form filed out of.

I tried adding a text box but a) doesn't work as advertised b) you can't define the size, the text box shrinks down to the amount of text is in it. I need to be visually obvious, have a shape.

I could do it by going in to InDesign, creating a blank page with a fillable form, exporting as a single page PDF then inserting into this long PDF. But I would lose the page numbers, and why would I have to do this? 

So all I need to do is add a large fillable field that I can do in PDF. Google hasn't helped much.

Man does anyone else hate how they keep moving around the tools and putting them in menus that make no sense and it takes forever to find anything? So frustrating. 

Thanks!!!

[try67]

You're not using the correct tool. To add a fillable text field you must go to Tools - Prepare Form - Add New Field and then select Text Field and draw your field on the page. Under the field's Properties you'll be able to set the font, text size, text color, fill color, etc. What you've described is something like the Add Text commenting tool, which is not what you should be using for this.

[Juan Cano]

Thanks; I can't do it that way, because if i choose that, it stars "scanning" the entire PDF to identify potential 'form fields' in it. This behemoth is 297 pages. I don't have time to review and remove the fields it could've added to the other pages. 

Is there a way to choose Prepare form without Acrobat scanning the whole doc?

[Thom Parker]

Also, turn off automatic form field detection. 

[Juan Cano]

Ahhhhh!!!!! How do you do that??

[Thom Parker]

Go to the Acrobat Preferences and select the "Forms" category. Uncheck the auto detect option: