What Does This Cursor Mean (Acrobat)?

Forum|Forum|5 years ago
January 8, 2021
4 replies
4300 views

I have a PDF with a fillable form and every time I fill in a field and then click on the next one I want to type in the mouse cursor changes to this thing with an hourglass and a keyboard or a calculator or something next to it and the application hangs for about 20 seconds before letting me type in the next field. It does this in Pro and in Reader and I just want to know what the cursor means. I'm sure once I find out it will be obvious but for now the fact that I can't seem to find an answer is as annoying as the delay between clicking on fields. Here's a picture:

PDF forms

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try67

Braniac

All the Calculation scripts in the file execute each time the value of any field is changed. This is what you're seeing happening there.

N

NMKevinAuthor

New Participant

Thanks for the additional info, when I'm back in the office I'll have a look at the console to see if there are any errors although I'm not sure I'll be able to fix anything if there is.

N

NMKevinAuthor

New Participant

Thanks a lot for the replies, I figured it was something like that but then wasn't sure since I figure the regular hourglass would have sufficed for something like that. Anyway, I'm not sure exactly what is going on in the background of the form (it's actually a form from OSHA) but I am glad to finally know for sure what that cursor means! Thanks again.

ls_rbls

Braniac

++late answer

Seems like your PDF has some calculations that run in the background.

That is what the calculator icon denotes. The hourglass clock on top of the calculator icon definitely means something in that calculation is taking a long time to porcess (I may be wrong though).

If you're using any JavaScript, or a lot of fields that depend on field calculations, maybe you'll need to re-verify the workflow between these calculating fields.

Use CTRL+J keyboard combination to open the debugging console and see if there are any logged error messages that your PDF is producing when you try to perform an action.