Prevent multiple text boxes from merging into one large text box

The solution is to avoid being in the situation where you edit PDFs. It's a desperate last resort even if Adobe's marketing department try to paint it otherwise. Somehow it has led people into actually making and editing files in Acrobat, rather than treating this as a firefighting tool for fixing typos.

The boxes merge because they don't exist except when you are editing. I explained this as clearly as I could. There are no boxes in the file to tag, have anchor options, or anything else.

It really is considered a desperate last resort to edit the PDF page. The workflow we've suggested (remake PDF, replace pages) is very strongly recommended. Would be nice if it were otherwise.

Yes, you're missing something, and looking for a solution way more complex than you need.

1. Backup the form because it's easy to mess up and end up with nothing !!

2. Make the new "background" PDF (let's call it NEWBACKGROUND.PDF)

3. Open the form (let's call it OLDFORM.PDF).

4. Choose replace pages.

5. Select the NEWBACKGROUND.PDF file.

6. The one page background of OLDFORM.PDF will be replaced by NEWBACKGROUND.PDF. All the form fields and scripts will be preserved/

7. Save it as NEWFORM.PDF or whatever.

Hi folks,
There is one bad workaround: select the box (click the boundary box outline) and copy and paste a copy of that box.

Delete all text except for the text you want ungrouped from the rest.

So for instance if you want five independent boxed paragraphs, paste five copies of the full box, and delete enough text in each so that each of the new boxes has a different paragraph.

If you save and close Adobe you may need to repeat this.

I realise Acrobat is not designed for heavy editing but sheesh this seems like a trivial feature.

I have the same problem. I have been arguing with Adobe staff for 3 months. They have tried multiple different ways to blame 3rd party softwares as causing the issue. I have tried Word (text) documents, excel documents, I have used Acrobat DC Pro to scan my document.

They said when scanning to do it at 600 DPI (doesn't work either). I have even made a word document which is nothing but a blank page. I then saved it as a text file and imported into adobe. I then went into Edit Tools and made a half dozen Add Text boxes. Once I hit the save button, the program, combines all of the boxes into one "master text box" (my name). If Adobe was not designed to use this way, then why do they provide that feature? You will not get them to admit this is a major program flaw. Can you imagine using Word or Publisher combining text boxes, where you can't made an adjustment or correction to the original text box without it affecting the rest of the text boxes? There tech support had even linked up with my pc and tried to make corrections, which they were not successful. Their solution, re-do the document from scratch. Once you try to re-do, the error just repeats itself in different areas of the document page. There is no consistency to when or how it causes these errors. Maybe someone who has a connection should have a major PC magazine do the same text and report on the results to the general public. All in all, a great program, but this one major flaw makes it a very tedious program.

I am using Acrobat XI.

I have similar question but a bit different question.

Is there a setting /program option that allows the user to turn ON /OFF that reshaping of the boxes? In my case after saving and reopen the file, the boxes are changed in a way that a sentence is now contained by multiple boxes. Amazingly, frequently they are broken into weird pieces: the left part of a paragraph and the middle or right part of the sentence are boxed separately of the left box. This makes IMPOSSIBLE to change a sentence, forcing my to rebuild the original sentence or mathematical formula by copy and paste in a single box. I HATE THAT WASTE OF MY TIME!!!! 

Are you using the Edit Text & Images tools? Because what you're describing are not text fields, but text "boxes".

If that's the case the answer is no, you can't tell the application to merge or separate them.