Participant

Question

Unable to fill out forms in Acrobat

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
April 17, 2024
4 replies
5476 views

I've got an issue where a user is unable to fill out forms in Acrobat semi-frequently. There are occasional times where they can fill the forms out but then the form box turns a darker blue, and the option to fill out the form is greyed out.

W

Withaph

Participant

The same thing is happening to me. I am trying to fill out a government form and it's shutting me out. I have no control over the options on the form. I have a Macbook and none of the fixes work for me.

Adobe needs to repair this! I feel like they don't even care about Acrobat anymore. It's SO buggy.

M

mixed

Participant

And still this problem remains in 2025, with government forms not able to be easily completed on the PAID version of Acrobat, nor are loyal users able to install the Free version that does actually show the form fields for completion in blue, because of this mess! Here's an example of such a form: Form 5472 (Rev. December 2023)IRS (.gov)https://www.irs.gov › pub › irs-pdf › f5472

In paid Adobe Acrobat you probably can't see where to click to fill in the form and therefore assume you can't when compared with regular Adobe Acrobat. It seems like you may be better off completing it withing Safari before saving it!

creative explorer

Community Expert

@mixed this isn't an Adobe issue, it's a SECURITY ISSUE. This form was created by a government agency and they have applied certain protocols so that you can't edit the PDF for a reason. Is there a way around this? Of course there is, but then that's breaking the law too!

m

Amal.

Community Manager

Hi there

Thank you for your patience so far.

The issue has been resolved. Please reboot the machine and then relaunch Acrobat.

Then, wait for some time and try to fill out the forms again.

Let us know how it goes.

Thanks,

Amal

Marking a reply or response “Correct” will help future users with the same issue quickly identify the correct answer.

T

Theobromin

Participant

I've been having the same issue, and it still persists on my end, even after restarting. It's currently on version 24.1, which seems to be the most recent one as far as I can see. I've been using my browser to edit and then download PDFs, which is not a sustainable solution at all.

try67

Community Expert

It doesn't seem to make sense that just restarting will solve the issue. There must be a new update being pushed to solve it. Try forcing an update via the Help menu and see if that sorts it out.

Thom Parker

Community Expert

Other users have posted the same issue. Looks like some kind of Acrobat update screwup.

I believe the problem was fixed by performing a "repair" and then switching to the old Acrobat UI.

See this thread:

https://community.adobe.com/t5/acrobat-discussions/form-filed-now-always-e-sign-field/m-p/14559431

Thom Parker - Software Developer at PDFScriptingUse the Acrobat JavaScript Reference early and often

J

Jaykob36804393k9z8Author

Participant

The issue still appears on old Acrobat UI. I am able to tab through the fields on the form so that is a temporary workaround.

K

Kizashi72

Inspiring

Yep, I just tried reverting to old UI too, to just see what would happen, and you're right, issues still persists.

K

Kizashi72

Inspiring

This just started happening to me today too! Very annoying as I'm working on rolling out a revision to one of our forms- literally today.

What I've found is that if I hit "Tab" on my keyboard, i can tab thru all the form fields and fill them out, but if I try to click in any, I am experiencing the ams thing OP is, and can't typpe in that field unless I hit "Enter" on the keyboard first. I All of my drop down boxes are also affected when I click them, the drop down expands only for a microsecond, then automatically collapses, so it is impossible to make a selection.

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