Prepare Form - Which characters are recognized as radio buttons?

[joejarvis]

Which characters does Acrobat's "Prepare Form" tool recognize as radio buttons?

In my testing, Acrobat failed to recognize:

• Word-native radio buttons (inserted via Developer tab on the Word Ribbon)
• Unicode radio button character (  )
• Wingdings 2 glyph #158 (⦿)
• Unicode ballot box (check box) character (☐)

[George_Johnson · Accepted solution]

For radio button groups, it's more complicated than that. See the following for a bit more info (see page 4): https://acrobatusers.com/assets/collections/tutorials/legacy/id_2263/acro9_designforms.pdf

It's a bit dated, but it might help.

[joejarvis]

George_Johnson​: The technical white paper you linked to was very helpful and solved my problem. Thank you!

When I tested, Acrobat's Prepare Form tool successfully recognized radio buttons from Word when I placed a 12 pt. x 12 pt. inline oval to the left of each text choice. I inserted the oval in Word by going to the Insert tab on the Ribbon, clicking the Shapes drop down in the Illustrations group, and then selecting an oval. Once I sized and positioned one oval correctly, it was easy to cut and paste the oval for each choice. However, be forewarned that because the oval is a shape and not text, even if positioned inline, it will not appear in Word in Draft view, only in Print Layout view.

And if anyone from Adobe is reading this thread, please add detection for the Unicode character for a radio button!

[try67]

I too was frustrated with the unpredictable nature of this command, so I developed my own (paid-for) tool, which converts Wingdings characters to check-boxes or radio-buttons with 100% accuracy. You can find it here: Custom-made Adobe Scripts: Acrobat/Reader -- Convert Wingdings To Fields

[Suzan5E27]

It would be great if for the next Adobe Update if they could make it to where the Prepare Form feature could better detect things to be a Radio button instead of a Check Box button. For example, Yes/No questions. I often spend an extra 30 minutes having to have the Check Boxes to Radio buttons.