Unable to delete form field

[Lauren25194034oake]

I'm editing/preparing a form and there are form fields that have no label and cannot be deleted. They do not show when printed but I just don't want them there. Screen clip of example below.

[Thom Parker · Accepted solution]

The internal form related structure of this PDF has been corrupted.  There's nothing you can do about it.  You'll need to start over with a clean PDF and copy over the fields that work. 

[Lauren25194034oake]

Whomp Whomp Whomp for me. Thanks so much for the response (even if it's what I was afraid of)! 

[try67]

I call these "ghost fields". The only way I found to remove them was to move them to an empty spot on the page and then use the Redaction tool to draw a square around them and redact them away.

[Thom Parker]

Clever soluition!! tricking Acrobat into deleting the ghost fields.

The problem is that the widget annotations are in the Pages dictionary, but not in the document level AcroForm dictionary.  If you have PDF CanOpener, you can delete them directly out of the page dictionary. Or reconnect them by copying back to the AcroForm dictionary. But that can get tricky for fields with the same name or hierarchy. 

The redaction solution works becuase the ghost fields are basically unhandled page annotations.

I don't know why this happens, but I've seen it often enough to know that it is Acrobat that is doing it. I suspect it's a copy issue, i.e. Acrobat somehow misses that the widget annot is a form field and performs a regular page annoation copy rather than a form field copy.  

[Sack Attack]

Adobe Acrobat is garbage. I've worked with this product for 27 years and every one of the version has bugs that is inherited from the beginning. I have had clients who save to encrypted PGP drives and their documents were corrupted. Word Excel and millions of other files were not corrupted. There are numerous clients whith Acrobat issues. Many open tickets with Acrobat with no resolution but to delete the corrupted docs and start over.