A set of text fields that will not delete in the layout, crashes when trying in Prepare Forms panel

[David Borrink]

I have a document that has produced a set of corrupt fields, I assume. They are all connected with the same field name of "H" and will not delete when I select them. They don't appear on the layout in Prepare Form mode, but if I draw a marquee with the cursor, I see the anchor points of a ghost outline. I can try to delete the item, but it's still there, as if there is a ghost of a former field on the page.

There are five sets of these in the document on five different pages. If I go to Prepare Forms > Fields, I can choose alphabetical order and find the "H" field listed. If I click on that... CRASH, there goes Acrobat.

I can drag these "ghost" fields to the bottom corner of the layout and change their size to small so they are not in the main layout, and so they stay. But I don't want them in document. I'm skeptical I can just "leave them". Any ideas what I can do?

[Bernd Alheit]

Re-create the form.

[David Borrink]

36 pages. 75 different fields IDs. Over 300 fields in the entire document. It has taken 16+ hours to get this document created. It is a compilation of 12 different forms brought together with common field IDs to significantly reduce the time it takes for a user to fill these out.

Re-creating is not a good option. Finding a way to say "delete all fields with an ID of 'h'" should not be difficult. Mabye it takes a javascript command? I don't know. But starting from scratch seems like major overkill for a basic request.

[Bernd Alheit]

Have you the corrupt fields on all pages?

[try67]

Removing them with JS is not likely to work. In my experience the only way to get rid of such "ghost" fields is to redact them. Drag them to an empty corner, create a Redaction annotation above them, and then apply it.

[David Borrink]

That's more like it. I know you can redact text and images, but how does that work with a field object?

[try67]

Works exactly the same way.