How to start troubleshooting a form?

[erszka]

My client and I are having trouble getting this form to work. It's intended to be downloaded, filled out and saved, but the fields are not easily fillable. I have (tried to) enable Advanced Features.

How do I start troubleshooting this? Would this be easier to do in something like Open Office?

Here's the form:

http://mindful-living.ca/Intake_form.pdf

[Karl Heinz Kremer · Accepted solution]

It's not clear what you are trying to do. The form you linked to is not an interactive form, it's something you would print and fill out with a pen or pencil. If you want to fill this form in Acrobat or the free Reader, you would need to use the commenting tools, which would require you to pick where text should be entered, and then nudge that text around to "look good". It's much easier to use Acrobat's form features to add interactive form fields, and then let the user click in such a field and add information. This will always look better - and will be easier to use - than a form without interactive elements.

[erszka]

Thanks Karl. I'm not sure why I wasn't able to access the form field blocks before, but they are working after I selected Prepare Form.

[Karl Heinz Kremer]

The "Prepare Form" function will take it's best guess at what is and what is not a form field, but it usually gets things wrong (or it picks the wrong field type), so be prepared to clean up after the function runs. I actually don't even bother with the automatic form field generation, and I always just add the fields manually. If you want your fields to have meaningful names, you have to touch every field anyways.