Once Again WIth the TOFU?

[Jason Burnett]

I am posting this here after working with a file for the last several hours. I have wasted an entire day on this project and I cannot believe that this can be so difficult.

I downloaded the Police Collision Report used by the Police in Georgia when reporting a traffic accident. I got the file directly from the GADOT website in .pdf format. It is one of about 10 different documents that I downloaded. 

I need to create colored boxes and custom-numbered annotations behind a lot of the fields in this form.

The form uses Arial, Arial Bold, and Times New Roman.

When I open the file in Acrobat Pro, everything looks as good as can be expected. I can choose the Edit PDF tool and modify the field labels throughout the form. Buit because of the limited graphics features on Acrobat, I am going to have to create these custom annotations in Illustrator.

Of the 10 documents that I downloaded, this the only document that has a problem opening in Illustrator. All of the other documents work great, I can edit the text, use the path tools to ensure that my shapes are always perfectly aligned with no overlapping. I can use Graphic Styles to ensure that things look consistent and Character Styles for my text. Effortless. And then I can save the file and still open it in Acrobat and everything is great.

However, this one file simply does not let me have access to the text. It's all TOFU boxes. And the odd thing is that Page 2 of this document is the exact document that I downloaded separately and it works fine on its own. In this document, tofu, tofu, tofu.

To give you an idea how many things I have tried, here's the list. I can guarantee that I have tried more than I am going to list, but this is enough to express my dismay and perhaps provide some insight into what the problem is.

• First, I verified that I had Arial and Arial Bold, TimesNewRoman, and TimesNewRoman Bold installed.
• I opened the file in Acrobat Pro and performed a Save As Other.... to create a new PDF from Acrobat. Did not help.
• I printed the file to my Windows Adobe PDF printer and verified that I had embedded the fonts in the printer profile before printing. It simply created outlines for all text in the final output.
• I even tried to use Illustrator's RETYPE beta feature and I think it would have worked but I had to manually match the font on over 500 different elements--took too long, still not working.
• I tried saving the file in different PDF configurations from PDFA to PDFX nothing helped.
  I tried printing the document to an image, then opening the document and had Acrobat OCR the text. From there, I saved as a pdf document and the problem remained. 
• I have tried using a different typeface for the entire document in Acrobat (which wasn't easy) and still justr tofu. 
• I have created other documents as PDF documents and they open fine.
• I have run Preflight on the document to determine if there are nay problems and everything looks good. 
• I have tried non-adobe PDF editors and nothing worked.
• I have tried repairing the document-no help.
• I hve tried downloading a second copy--still no help.
• I have uninstalled the fonts in question, restarted and opened the file expecting it would prompt me to replace the fonts in Illustrator--nope.
• I have re-installed the fonts in question and restarted with no help either.
• I have used a non-beta version of Illustrator--no luck. 
• I have posted a similar request to the Illustrator forums and of course, the all sent me here.

Here is a link to the document from the DOT website:DOT-523.pdf 

Here is a link to another document from the same location that works: CrashReporting/overlay.pdf 

Again, all I need is to be able to open the DOT-523.PDF document in Illustrator to make same layout changes that cannot be done in Acrobat. I need this file to act like all of the other files from the same site that work fine in Illustrator. 

Thanks in advance for any support. I promise I have spent the last 5 hours at least searching for a solution, following various sets of well-intentioned plans, suffering through nasty comments by Acrobat fans about Illustrator, nasty comments about Acrobat from Illustrator fans, and nothing has worked. 

[try67 · Accepted solution]

The bottom line is that what you're trying to do should not be attempted in the first place. Editing the static contents of a PDF file is a bad idea. What you need to do is edit the original file used to create the PDF, then create a new PDF file from it. If you don't have access to the original file the next best thing is to export the PDF to a workable format.

Illustrator is not the right application for this job, since this is not a vector image file. It's basically a big table with texts in it. You should export it to InDesign and/or Word and see which one works best. Make all of your changes there and then create a new PDF. Since there are no form fields in this file you don't even need to worry about copying them over, although you should probably add them, as that would make filling it in much easier for the end-user.

Make sure you ALWAYS keep a copy of the original file, in case you want to make changes to it in the future.

Consider your time wasted on this so far a sunk cost, and start over. You will find that it works much better this way in the long run.

[try67 · Accepted solution]

The bottom line is that what you're trying to do should not be attempted in the first place. Editing the static contents of a PDF file is a bad idea. What you need to do is edit the original file used to create the PDF, then create a new PDF file from it. If you don't have access to the original file the next best thing is to export the PDF to a workable format.

Illustrator is not the right application for this job, since this is not a vector image file. It's basically a big table with texts in it. You should export it to InDesign and/or Word and see which one works best. Make all of your changes there and then create a new PDF. Since there are no form fields in this file you don't even need to worry about copying them over, although you should probably add them, as that would make filling it in much easier for the end-user.

Make sure you ALWAYS keep a copy of the original file, in case you want to make changes to it in the future.

Consider your time wasted on this so far a sunk cost, and start over. You will find that it works much better this way in the long run.

[Jason Burnett]

Though I appreciate your advice, I find it entrely unsatisfying.

Imagine asking for help with your car only to be told that you shouldn't be using your car in that manner. You should find some other car and use it, then switch back when you get where you are going.

[begin rant -- trigger warning don't read if you are unable to handle someone expressing raw dissent about a product you love]

Why would Acrobat provide tools for editing PDFs if you aren't supposed to edit PDFs? And since the actual PDF that I am editing is a completed Police Report that I only need to highlight fields with color boxes, the limited controls and terrible output provided by Acrobat itself makes Acrobat useless for a situation like this. One has to ask what is Acrobat for if it's not to edit the content of a PDF document  and why would they offer the Edit PDF functionality if not?

Also, with regards to editing the document source file, clearly it's a government form that I do not have access to the source file so that's not a possiblity.  Not only that but when presenting evidende in court, altering the source document in ways other than higlighting and redacting is frowned upon. Again, I just wanted crisp field bakgrounds as a separate layer that I could append to the protected source.
Looking at the meta-data for the file, it was created in a program that I hve never heard of and do not have access to. 

While I appreciate the idea that converting this document into a fillable form would generally be a good idea, I have to ask, "Have you ever tried to do convert a form of this nature to a working form using Acrtobat?" It's not pretty,

Roboform was so profoundly better, but in standard Adobe fashion, they consumed them and killed it off almost entirely to avoid any sort of competition with Acrobat. But that's a side rant.
Acrobat does a terrible job of guessing fields. There are more than 100 fields in this form. It is poorly laid out violates every common sense best practice for forms. I hope to never see it again once I am done.

I had considered scanning the completed Police Report and editing the bitmap in Photoshop to highlight the errors in the form, but that somehow felt like a bad idea. I figured that using the Shape Builder tool in Illustrator, I could pretty easily create background shapes for the fields I needed then use the vector shape layer alone to combine with the actual form to present the highlighted fields in a visually pleasing way not available in Acrobat.

Converting this file to MS Word turned out to be a nightmare since it used about 1000 individually placed text boxes, often one for each character in a label. NIghtmareish. Also, I find it strange you would suggest InDesign rather than Illustrator. Illustrator can quickly and easily make seemless shapes that perfectly fit every field. InDesign might help make a better form, but the text boxes won't be configured in any logical way such that you would have centered text in a box, for example. Everything would have to ge manually adjusted just to get the shapes of the fields. Nightmareish.

One of these days, I will find a project that uses Acrobat in a way that helps me to understand the enthusiasm for it. Right now, I turn down jobs every week where someone has a PDF that they absolutely hate and need fixed. I guess this is a problem with monopolies and predatory companies like Adobe. 

Just ignore my senseless rants. I will mark your answer as the correct answer and hope you don't take anything I said personally. I do appreciate your response, I was just hoping for a different answer than the one I get every time I ask a question about PDF documents in Acrobat.

[creative explorer · Accepted solution]

@Jason Burnett Since you have access to Acrobat Pro, you can do the following, and just create a form from the fields. I do this all the time when I need to fill out forms from massage to physio to government forms. My printing is worse than a doctor's writing, chicken scratch is what I've been told and it's worse than that. So, I create a form, so I can type it in instead. Sometimes, the offices ask if they can use my form for their needs...and I always say sure, thanks for asking. 

Anyways...

1. Open the file in Acrobat Pro.
2.  Am using a Mac, so, I go to 'All Tools' - Edit a PDF
3.  Click on 'Prepare a form,' 
   
   
4.  It will ask you to choose an option to create a form, and I use the first one as am in it anyways 'Select a file'
5. Click on "create a form'
6.  Acrobat creates a form for you. The blue fields can be changed as the text is defaulted to be auto size and Helvetica on my end.
   
7.  If you double click on the blue fields, you can edit the text field properties. 
   
8.  If you wanted to do, and I normally do this because am 'weird,' but I change the auto font size to something smaller and change the font to be Calibri because it takes less ink (that's what the internet says!). So what I would do, and select the first line, "Agency case number' and pick a few by holding the 'Shift' key and click on the last line here, such as 'Bike'
   
   
9.  Right-click to select 'Properties' 
10. A new dialog box will open. The font size will say 'varies' and enter a font size, and font.
    
11.  It appears my font is grey-out because a font can't be changed. So, I may need to select less. You can play around with it or leave it as the default font. 
12. If I double-click the 'County' box on the form, the appearance of the font and size is shown. 
13.  You may have noticed that in the same Text Field Properties, you can change the 'Fill Colors' too but that is only for the text field...
14. Just remember, you may want to have a lighter colour because of the text color involved here. 
15.  Click on the Fill Color, and a colour pop-up will open. Pick a color. 
    
16.  Click on the red dot to close the color pop-up. And close to close the text field properties dialog box too
    
17.  Click on Preview. And when I type over the PDF, the highlight text box is in Pink
    
    
    
18. If click of the pink text box, the pink box is no longer highlighted.
19. Which is probably not what you wanted? So,  we need to turn off 'Highlighted Existing Fields'. Click on the three dots in the field at the side. And see the check mark beside 'Highlight existing fields', click that off
     
20. Now if you preview your form it should look like this

    
    @Jason Burnett all of this was done in Acrobat Pro. Hopefully, this works for you?

[try67]

> Imagine asking for help with your car only to be told that you shouldn't be using your car in that manner. You should find some other car and use it, then switch back when you get where you are going.

Imagine you bought a VW bug and are trying to use it to move the entire contents of your house. Will you complain to the manufacturer that your sofa doesn't fit in it, or instead replace it with a van, which is more suited for the task?

[Jason Burnett]

If my VW Bug had advertised that it had the capacity to move a sofa, you sure as heck better bet I would complain. I'd be irate. I mean if a car manufacturer is going to sell you a bug telling you that you can use it to move an entire house and you can't fit anything in it, that's a crime. You could sue the manufacturer and get them to replace your bug with with VW Bus that would allow you to move your softa. And furtnermore, you would force the manufacturer to stop representing their vehicles as something they aren't.

And just so I can be sure, you are saying that Adobe Acrobat, which has tools for forms and has editing PDF as one of its primary functions, is actually not fit to do forms or editing? Or were you referencing a different analogy here?

[try67]

I never said it was not fit for creating form fields. It's not fit for creating forms from scratch, although technically you can do it there.

Same can be said of editing static contents.