Removing The Ability To Click Text on a PDF Form

[smizy]

Hello all,

I've have been scratching my brain for several days on how to solve this issue. I was unable to find answers to the issue myself so I'm seeking some help!

I have acrobat Pro DC and have created a fill-able pdf form. My base layer has lines and text that some of the field boxes go over.

The issue I'm having is sometimes when I go to click a fill-able field it selects the nearby text instead and puts my cursor there. I am looking for a way to make my text non clickable so that only my fields can be selected. Any help would be great as this is holding up my project!

[Jon Fritz]

Moved out of the Forum Lounge and over to the PDF Forms forum.

[grege76139524]

Hi,

If you protect the document only the forms will be editable.

Hope this is the answer you were looking for.

Greg

[smizy]

Hey Greg,

Thanks for the response. I enabled editing protection but I still get the same issue. To make it more clear when I click a text I am able to highlight it. I would like a way to disable that so that users are only able to click the form fields.

[George_Johnson]

Which tool is active when yo're attempting to use the form? You will have the best luck with the Hand tool, and there is a user preference (Edit > Preferences > General)  that you can disable so that text is not selected when using the Hand tool.

[try67]

What kind of highlighting are you referring to? If it's just the selection

of the text then the only way to disable it is by converting it to an

image.

[smizy]

This is exactly what I'm referring too. I gave a try at doing this a while ago but wasn't sure if it was best practice or how to convert layers into images like that. Do you have a reference on how to do this?

[try67 · Accepted solution]

To convert the pages to images go to File - Save As Other - Images and then select something like PNG.

After you created the image files go to File - Create - Combine files into a single PDF and select them.

After you created your new file you can secure it (via File - Properties - Security) to prevent it from being OCRed.

[smizy]

Thanks for the help! This worked, the only downside is it is now an image so it is pixelated rather than smooth vectors on the pdf. Thanks for all the help everyone!