Prepare Form Not Creating All Form Fields

[Jen Coken]

When I prepare a PDF as a form, only a few of the fields that need to be created as fillable get created.  I then have to do them by hand, which defeats the purpose of using the Prepare Form function.  Please help!

[Bernd Alheit]

The detection of fields is not perfect.

[try67]

There's no easy solution to this issue. The form fields wizard does a decent job (usually), but never perfect. You will always have to manually add missing fields, remove fields that shouldn't be there, and adjust others. It can be a lot of work.

The only other way of creating fields consistently is to use a script, but that has to have something to base the detection of the fields on, such as special characters. I've developed a couple of (paid-for) tools that will convert such characters to fields with 100% accuracy. One script will convert certain Wingdings characters to check-boxes or radio-buttons, and another will convert sequences of underscores to text fields. You can find them here:

https://www.try67.com/tool/acrobat-reader-convert-wingdings-characters-to-check-boxes-or-radio-butto...

https://www.try67.com/tool/acrobat-reader-convert-underscores-to-text-fields

[jnix612 · Accepted solution]

I know this is an old post, but I feel I need to share how I can convert most of my fields using the Prepare Form. My current project has 80 fields. So I definitely needed a PDF to prepare the form using all the fields I created in MS Word.

My best practices:

• I use MS Word to format.
• I don't shade the shapes or tables.
  • This is the key. I had some fields shaded, and others not. PDF did not pick up any of the shaded fields. Once I removed the shading, the PDF converted every single field.
• The border for shapes and/or tables is always a light gray solid line (color does not matter).
  • Important: The PDF prepare form reads horizontal lines. Make sure to use lines (I simply add a border to ensure perfect alignment of my PDF boxes).
• If you're using a circle in MS Word (radio button in PDF) or a square for the check mark and it doesn't convert, try increasing the shape size by one.

I hope this helps.