Oh my! After spending a couple of days working on creating forms in Adobe InDesign and exporting to PDF with the goal of making fillable forms, I decided to write a post to offer my two cents on solving some of the problems and solutions I discovered.
There are many ways to create PDFs, and several ways to create fillable PDF forms (like this one), but since I have access to the current version of the Adobe Creative Suite (CS5) I decided to go with an “All Adobe” workflow.
Before I get started, these are the reference points I’m working from:
- Adobe’s InDesign help docs, containing some excellent information
- Parts One and Two of Acrobat Friendly Form Design, from the InDesigner (extremely in-depth, requires fairly advanced knowledge of InDesign)
- The extremely helpful and concise white paper from Adobe’s Lori DeFurio.
As anyone who has attempted this in the past can attest, creating forms is challenging enough, without the additional task of making them fillable. While you can create forms in any program that allows you to create text, making attractive, well laid out forms is something most artworkers will want to use InDesign for. Thus, the challenge becomes how to create a form in InDesign that includes all the interactive fields.
The answer is both maddeningly simple and frustratingly complex. InDesign will not create an interactive form – it will only create a PDF that can be imported to Adobe Acrobat, where the Automatic Field Detection will take a stab at converting your form into a fillable PDF. Unfortunately, there are no real concrete guidelines for creating a bulletproof form, and since I have 8 forms to create that I will most likely spend the next 3 or 4 weeks tweaking, updating and recreating, I really didn’t want to have to duplicate work in Acrobat having created perfect forms in InDesign.
I spent a couple of hours prototyping, testing and prodding, and discovered a new level of hatred for Adobe’s concept of effective and efficient workflows. That said, within a day I was creating perfect forms with little work required after importing to Acrobat.
Fillable text fields are achievable in a number of ways. The video from Adobe’s help docs suggests creating underlines below the label text using InDesign’s ‘Rule Above/Below’ functionality. I found it simpler and more effective for my needs to create a table in InDesign, with the label in the left column and the text field in the right.
Using underlines caused my text fields to be created with a line height differing from the rest of the document, whereas tables created perfect text fields at the correct size. I was frustrated to discover that even when using tables, if you set table and cell stroke to 0% color Acrobat fails to detect the text fields. The whole process is very touchy feely, with Auto Field Detection guessing where fields and labels are based on the proximity of elements to each other and not much else.
Radio buttons were extremely easy to create. By creating text and placing a small circle with a standard stroke next to the text, Auto Field Detection immediately sees this and configured the buttons. More importantly, it adds the desired behaviour, that only one option can be selected at any given time.
Check boxes were a little trickier, and most of my testing time went into creating usable check boxes that were automatically detected. As with radio buttons, conventional wisdom suggests that using a certain element, a square with a stroke, should give the auto field detection enough to work with. Unfortunately, my check boxes refused to be detected as such, and Acrobat decided instead to give me several tiny text fields.
The most frustrating part of the process for me is that Acrobat will not let you convert an element to a different type, such as text field to check box. I’m sure logically and programatically, this isn’t as simple as it seems, but since I created the elements in InDesign and there WERE detected by Acrobat, it drove me nuts that my only option at that point was to delete the text field and create check boxes from scratch.
None of the help documents on the subject offered any relief. Lori DeFurio’s white paper explains that using squares is the way to tell Auto Field Detection that you wish to create a check box, but went no further. In a post long since lost to my browser history, I read that creating boxes using the Zapf Dingbats drop shadowed box character works, but it didn’t for me. Eventually I discovered that the size of the square is all important – my boxes were sized approximately to the adjacent line of text, but perhaps Auto Field Detection saw this as too much of a coincidence. Sizing the box down solved the problem immediately.
While the forms I’ve created aren’t perfect by any means, the workflow is good enough that I can spend my time where it should be spent – in InDesign improving and editing, not in Acrobat doing pointless, repetitive work. Hopefully this lengthy post is of use to someone out there.
Note: I have previously used a product called ‘Adobe LiveCycle’ to build interactive forms, but all the same problems existed (back then, at least) and more. I challenge anyone without a degree in marketing bullshit to visit LiveCycle’s current page at adobe.com and decipher what the software actually does.
