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Interactive PDF - click a button and send whole PDF to an email address

Community Beginner ,
Jan 27, 2025 Jan 27, 2025

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I have design a one-page interactive PDF - it's a form for people to become members of a cultural association. So they fill out their details, it all looks nice and pretty. I have a button at the bottom that says "submit". 

 

I want people to be able to click this button and for the whole form to be sent as a PDF to an email address. 

Is this possible within indesign??

 

Also, how come elements of my design show up in Acrobat but not in Preview for example? (logos, icons, submit button etc). 

 

Thank you in advance. 

P.S. Please be nice. I've been a member of Adobe cloud since it started but this is my first community post. 

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Community Expert ,
Jan 27, 2025 Jan 27, 2025

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Interactivity in PDF is unreliable as you don't have any control over how it will be interpreted by myriad of 3rd-party PDF viewers (such as Preview, in your example). The only tool that displays PDF the way it's supposed to be is Acrobat.

 

I don't believe you can reliably implement the desired Submit button in PDF (if I'm wrong, I'm sure others will correct me).

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Community Expert ,
Jan 27, 2025 Jan 27, 2025

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P.S. You may want to simply create an online form (using Google Forms or another similar tool) and send a link to the form to your audience.

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Community Beginner ,
Jan 27, 2025 Jan 27, 2025

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Thank you Leo.r for your helpful reply. 

I guess I could do a google form or put a signup form on a website, but it kind defeats the object of being able to design a nice looking form with Indesign, doesn't it? I may be wrong, but I don't think google forms or contact form 7 or that kind of thing can give us the free reign to design like Indesign. 

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Community Expert ,
Jan 27, 2025 Jan 27, 2025

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Well... There's no end to online tools that can enable you to design a nice online form similar to the one you attached (such as WordPress+Elementor, to name one of about a million other options). Interactivity, reliability, and flexibility of such forms will, in my view, always surpass whatever you can achieve by exporting InDesign documents to a different format.

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Community Expert ,
Jan 27, 2025 Jan 27, 2025

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You must use Acrobat Pro to embed your PDF in a PDF-Portfolio to ensure that it will be opened in a software that complies with PDF specifications (Acrobat Reader, Foxit Reader…).

See attachment.

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Community Expert ,
Jan 27, 2025 Jan 27, 2025

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You can assign "Submit Form" action to a button in Indesign and also the URL, which in your case would be an email address. Enter in URL field: mailto:person@company.com.

As mentioned, a PDF form may not function as expected when opened in any app other than Acrobat Pro/Reader.

Jotform is an easy to use online form solution that can convert PDFs to a form. Check jotform here

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