Acrobat 8 Tutorial: Configuring form fields in Acrobat

Regardless of the type of form tool you use, form fields in Adobe® Acrobat® 8 Professional share many features in common; some configuration options are used for only certain types of fields. For example, you won’t find a Calculate tab in a Check Box Properties dialog, nor will you find a Validation tab in a Button Properties dialog.

Requirements

To complete this article, you will need the following software:

Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional

• Try
• Buy

Prerequisite knowledge:

Basic knowledge of working with forms in Acrobat

Configuring form fields

Here’s a brief rundown of the configuration tabs you can use with form fields in Acrobat 8 Professional:

• General tab. This tab is common to all types. You add a name and tooltip in this tab of the dialog, as well as define whether the field is visible or invisible. In addition, you specify if a field is required (an entry is mandatory) or if the field is read only. You may want to make the user’s name field required, for example, or specify calculated text fields as read only. The General tab is shown in Figure 1.
• Appearance tab. This tab is common to all types of form fields. You configure the color of the border and fill, as well as other characteristics, such as text.
• Options. All form fields have an Options tab; the contents vary according to the type of field. Buttons, for instance, contain options for choosing labels and images for their display; a Check Box field allows you to choose the appearance of the object, such as a checkmark or a star; Combo Box and List Box fields include areas where you can insert lists of items; a Radio Button field allows you to choose the style of the button and whether or not it is automatically selected (Figure 1).
• Actions. All form fields have this tab, and it looks and works the same in all types. Actions are activities Acrobat performs in response to some sort of interaction. For instance, clicking a button that opens another document is an action, as is typing a number in a form field that then shows a calculation in another form field.

   

  

  Figure 1: Choose options particular to the field type, such as the shape of a radio button.

• Format. Some types of form fields, such as Text Box and Combo Box fields, include this tab in their Properties dialogs. You can choose a type of formatting category to apply to the text your user enters in the field. Formatting can range from numbers to currency to dates (Figure 2).

   

  

  Figure 2: Configure the appearance of the text in fields that allow user input in the Format tab.

• Validate. You can restrict what your user enters in a field, such as a number or characters added in Text Box and Combo Box fields. Choose options in the dialog or use custom JavaScript validation scripts.
• Calculate. Perform a number of arithmetic functions using this tab of the dialog.
• Selection Change. This tab is seen only in List Box Properties. You set the behavior that occurs when the list box’s selection changes.

Considering accessibility

In many situations you need to make your forms compliant with accessibility standards. One of the key features of accessibility is appropriate communication with screen readers and other devices. Open the form field’s Properties dialog and in the Tooltip field on the General tab, type a short instruction, such as “Your month of birth.” Without a tooltip, the screen reader names the type of form field, and the user has no means of understanding its purpose.

Simplify your form building, simplify your life

Consider these ideas as you build a form:

• Make sure the design of the document can accommodate the size of the fields you intend to use.
• Set options that are common to all fields, such as the font and appearance, when you build the first field.
• Develop a system for adding and naming extra fields.
• When you want to change one property of several fields, such as the alignment, don’t change each field individually. Shift-click to select the fields and then open the Properties dialog using the shortcut menu. When you change the alignment, the change is applied to all the selected fields.
• JavaScript is written for each field separately; calculations aren’t allowed for a number of selected fields.

Where to go from here

For more information about working with forms in Acrobat 8, check out these other great tutorials:

• Handling form data in Acrobat 8, by Donna Baker
• Distributing and tracking a form with Acrobat 8, by Donna Baker
• Drawing a multistate button with Acrobat 8, by Donna Baker

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