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kyle7474
Participating Frequently
November 12, 2018
Question

Prevent multiple text boxes from merging into one large text box 2

  • November 12, 2018
  • 1 reply
  • 7349 views

There doesn't seem to be an Adobe solution to this.

As LUDICROUSLY expensive your products are, I demand perfection from every single product.

That being said, this is a feature that is needed.

A user on the now locked discussion, mentioned that editing was to fix typos generally, if that's the case, are we to recreate forms from scratch whenever we need to add a text box and a form field? Or an additional checkbox perhaps because we have created a new division in our company.

In this case, I simply am trying to add TWO things, a form field for a date and a radio button. I added the three words to my PDF and thought I was done, so I got out of editing mode and into preview...Well I forgot a colon, so I went back into editing and noticed the text boxes were all merged, I thought no big deal, and I proceeded to add the colon. As soon as I did that all hell broke loose. The rest of the text shifted immediately up next to the colon...

Long story short, I had to spend two hours fiddling with it before finally deleting the text and creating new text boxes.

I cannot tell you how frustrating Adobe is when creating a professional looking form. It makes me miss LiveCycle Designer...but xla forms are archaic now.

Side question: What are big corporations using to create PDF forms? There's no way they use Adobe Pro.

    This topic has been closed for replies.

    1 reply

    Dov Isaacs
    Dov Isaacs
    Legend
    November 12, 2018

    Forms fields are not “merged” by Acrobat.

    There is a big difference between creating a “text box” using Acrobat's PDF edit function versus creating a box of text that is locked (i.e., can't be modified by the person filling out the form - it is not variable) using Acrobat's forms editing feature.

    In the latter case (PDF forms), every item you create is kept separate which is I think what you want.

    In the former case, there is no such thing as an actual text box in PDF, regardless of what it may look like in Acrobat's PDF edit function. (Adobe doesn't control the PDF specification and can't simply add such a concept; PDF is an ISO standard!) When you use Acrobat's edit function, an attempt is made to second guess what the “original” formatting would have looked like in Word, PowerPoint, InDesign, whatever. That's why what you think are text boxes merge together. Logically, they appear to be related.

              - Dov

    - Dov Isaacs, former Adobe Principal Scientist (April 30, 1990 - May 30, 2021)
    K
    kyle7474Author
    Participating Frequently
    November 12, 2018

    Yeah I understand that. Ok let me rephrase, the text boxes are being identified all together.

    I have an interesting screenshot you and your devs should take a look at, it's odd.

    Hmmmm, is there something I'm doing incorrectly then? I click Add text up at the top to add all the text seen in this document.

    I have circled the oddities, those circled at one point was a nightmare for me to edit. Months back, I had to simply add a couple of radio buttons and this time the text was NOT identified as a block/chunk/whatever you want to call it and it's separated as you can see in the screenshot (again circled section.)

    What would be the best practice for my scenario, in this case, I added the following: "RMR:", two form fields (1 being a date), "RMR Date", and a radio button. Well this was difficult to do because the text below RMR: kept shifting and sliding.

    It would be nice if this was similar to Adobe, I would then merge a text layer with its corresponding form field, but that wouldn't make sense here obviously.

    What's the alternative here if things get really tricky? Just wipe out the text and recreate it?

    (Also this one page PDF is over 1MB...the older XLA form we have of this same document is 30KB. What is up with that?)

    Thank you for your time Dov

    K
    kyle7474Author
    Participating Frequently
    November 12, 2018

    Depends. There could be an image in the file that takes up 95% of that file-size, or an embedded font, etc.

    There's no "normal" size for a PDF page. It can be anything from a few KB to tens, if not hundreds, of MB.


    WHOA, a single page being hundreds of MB?

    Well there is a header/banner. But our old form from LiveCycle is around 287KB (Sorry @ Dov, not 30KB! I was guessing.)

    So old form is 287KB from old LiveCycle.

    New form built from the ground up all in Adobe is 1.185MB. It's just odd.

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