Edit form fields, but not PDF

[Joel Cherney]

I've been making and editing form fields in Acrobat for a very long time. Something changed in Acrobat recently, and I've not been able to figure out a way to change this behavior. Honestly, I've not even figured out which search terms to use to research the matter. When I'm trying to select a large number of fields, I'm accustomed to just drawing a box with the form-selection tool to multi-select the group of fields, whereupon I can go align them or move them or whatever. However, recent changes to Acrobat lead to the form-selection tool turning into an Edit PDF tool when I click on the background text, and I wind up selecting non-form text or objects. Then I have to click on a form element to turn the PDF-editing tool back into the form-element-selection tool. 

This is driving me bonkers, and the whole procedure of lining up a thousand checkboxes per file in twenty languages is taking far longer than it did before this change to the form-editing behavior. I really hope that there is an Acrobat-forum regular who can tell me how to turn off this undesired behavior. Barring that, can you confirm for me that there's no way to separate PDF-editing from form-editing, and I'll just have to unlearn around 15 years' worth of muscle memory? Thanks in advance. 

[Thom Parker · Accepted solution]

Here's a temp fix:

https://community.adobe.com/t5/acrobat/new-feature-unified-edit-text-and-form-fields/m-p/10684483#M2...

It also looks like Adobe is working on making this a preference:

https://acrobat.uservoice.com/forums/590923-acrobat-for-windows-and-mac/suggestions/38844709-acrobat...

[Joel Cherney]

1000x thanks for the reghack, Thom.