Hiding fields / Tab Order

[Alex37557756abic]

Originally all my documents were produced with PDFSharp, things worked and worked well, my main client needed acroforms so that removed PDFSharp from the equation, onto Adobe Acrobat which looked on the surface it could do almost everything, we got it working, except there were a few things that did not work, namely content landing in the tab order like lines etc.

Fast forward to the last couple of days, of trialing InDesign, it looks like it was going to do everything needed, using it with Acrobat Pro to do final output, but there are a couple of things that don't work, I need to remove some text fields from the tab order, I cannot find anything to do this, I have hidden fields in the final PDF document, these are essential, but I don't want the user to be able to tab into them.

I tried layers so putting the hidden fields into a layer, I might be missing something here but this did not work, the exported PDF shows the fields.

Fonts in the exported PDF I have to set this on all fields on the exported output it looks from my basic understanding that InDesign is not using the fonts properly, it seems to be using a different subset, the font I use is Montserrat but when the PDF is produced it's set to MontserratRoman-Black, and the point size has changed from 12 to 11. It's a ton of work to change these every time on the Exported PDF with a good chance something is going to get missed.

Whilst it is beyond the control of Adobe how the PDF's are rendered in different browsers I need to hide those fields or at least take them out of the tab order and make them so small they cannot be seen.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

Can't you just delete those Text Fields? And use some other way to "store the information"? 

[Alex37557756abic]

That is not an option, these documents need to be tracked I could get it down to a single guid string and then wire that up to a database record.

What I have worked on this morning and it works is make the field read only once it goes to Acrobat, make the field white text on a white background 5ptx5pt at the very top of the document reducing the chance it's clicked on read only only takes away the interactivity I can still write content to them via my code.

My work flow is clients are sent a PDF document of the data held on them, they have the chance to correct any mistakes by modifying the document and sending it back, once received we automatically process the document so we need something to identify which instance of a specific PDF it was as the client could potentially change every field. We have this working, just need to make sure that as much as possible those hidden fields don't get in the way.

Post production in Acrobat will work, just seems a shame that not everything can be done in InDesign, means there are two applications involved in the production of PDF's. 

Thanks for the reply.

[Robert at ID-Tasker · Accepted solution]

Not sure what and how you are doing in Acrobat - but Acrobat is scriptable. 

And if that's just for document tracking - can't you save this unique info in the PDF's properties? 

Or if you've created PDF - wouldn't be enough to just make fields with a specific / unique names? 

But I'm just brainstorming. 

[Alex37557756abic]

Have not got to Acrobat scripting yet, it's on my radar, I am mainly a programmer and PDF's come into the equation on a lot of my projects this is the first one where the data has to go in both directions, e.g. the acroforms. 

Not thought about document properties, good shout. There is info from around 6 tables, but there is nothing stopping me having a single table with all the id's and putting the guid to that table record in properties.

Slightly off topic I have been battling with Acrobat and PDF design, I wish I had found InDesign months ago, I can see why Acrobat is no good for actual design for the type of thing I do.

Thanks for the help, I appreciate it.

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

You are welcome. 

Vanilla Acrobat isn't the right tool for creation, from scratch, or heavy modification of the PDFs. 

Attached PDF has been generated in InDesign, then special JS code, generated during document creation, is injected in Acrobat through scripting - fully automated process. 

On the last page you should see all clicked options. 

But you need to open it on Desktop - mobile PDF reader - at least on Android - won't execute JS.

[Alex37557756abic]

Thank you, had a look at the scripts, useful, my first round of PDF's cannot use scripts as we cannot control how they are opened but there will be internal documents that will need scripts, thanks again.