PDF Forms Using Acrobat® and LiveCycle® Designer Bible

Chapter 7. Working with Form Fields

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Knowing the field types

• Using proper field names

• Arranging fields

• Using design aids

• Tabbing through fields

Up to this point, we've covered many different uses for auto detecting fields using auto field detection. When you need to quickly create a simple form and convert an application document to PDF and then use auto field detection as discussed in Chapter 5, you may not need to manually create new fields or edit fields on a form. When you scan a paper form using Acrobat's OCR engine as discussed in Chapter 6 and then auto field detection, you may not need to perform much manual editing.

In some cases, however, detecting fields won't work for all fields on a form. In other cases, you may need to start from scratch adding fields manually when auto field detection doesn't detect any fields. In these cases, you need to use Acrobat's Form tools, draw fields on a form, and make various changes to the fields' properties.

In this chapter, we leave Acrobat's auto-detection features and talk about the Form tools, how to manage fields on a form, use some design assistants, and set up tab orders. Even though you may often use auto field detection, you'll typically encounter instances in which you need some help using the methods described here.

Understanding the Field Types

Fields are added to a form in Form Editing Mode in Acrobat 9 and in Viewer mode in all earlier versions of Acrobat. In Acrobat 9, you have access to eight Form tools via a pull-down ...