Unable to highlight text in fillable form

[Guest]

Hi guys,

So I am working on an assignment for university and the prof provides a .pdf file to be edited in Acrobat DC. The assignment is is quite long and has light blue fillable fields after the questions for us to fill in the answers. The instructions in the questions say explicitly to highlight portions of text by choosing "Comments" > "Annotations" or "Drawing Markups" and I haven't have any trouble opening the Comment toolbar. The questions involve copying and pasting DNA sequences which can be up to 4000 characters in length and highlighting different portions. I am able to copy and paste my text into the field, and continue to edit the text, without a problem but once I choose the highlight tool, I am unable to highlight (or the underline tool for that matter) any of the text within the field. The highlight cursor pops up over the text in the blue field and when I attempt to highlight the text nothing happens but it does create a comment note in the sidebar with no apparent effect on the field or PDF at all. I don't have any trouble highlighting the text of the questions which are outside the blue fields. Does anyone know how I can enable highlighting within these fields? It's quite a long document and many of the questions involve highlighting long sequences. I am using Adobe Acrobat DC for Mac.

Thanks in advance,

Chris

[try67]

That's expected behavior. The commenting tools can not interact with data in the form fields, only with static content on the page.

[Guest]

When I emailed my professor about this issue his reply was "Hi, We have had more than 1,000  students over ten years do these assignments in PDF format. You can do it just like others. It isn’t that complicated." Surely there has to be some way to highlight this text in the document. That seems like very basic functionality and if "more than 1000 students over ten years" have handed in this assignment I'm sure there has got to be a workaround.

[try67]

Sorry, but they're wrong, or you're talking about two different things.

The only workaround is to flatten the form fields and convert them to static content. Then you'll be able to use the highlight (and other) commenting tools on them.

[gkaiseril]

Did you create the form fields?

Is it possible that the sequences to be added were put into comment text boxes and not form fields?

If is possible to make the form fields to be set to "Rich Text" and then color the font for strings within the form field.

If I select the comment tool and start outside the field, I can have the highlight the field or part of the field. So I could start the highlight above and text in the field I want to highlight and stroke down to cover the text I want to highlight.