Move those fields!

You can move, resize, and align form fields in numerous ways after you add a few to your form. Here are the basic techniques that you can apply to one or more fields:

• To move: Click a field and drag it to a new location. To make more precise movements, select a field and nudge it with the arrow keys. You can apply these same techniques to multiple field selections. Select multiple fields by holding down the Shift key while making your selections. The first selected field turns red, and subsequent selections are outlined in blue. Note that multiple field selections can be non-contiguous. After you’ve made your selections, release the Shift key and drag the selections to another location or nudge them with the arrow keys. When using the mouse to move multiple fields, you can constrain field movement to a horizontal or vertical direction by pressing the Shift key after you’ve started to drag the selected group of fields. To center single and multiple field selections on a page, right-click the field selection and choose Center and select Vertically, Horizontally, or Both on the Center submenu.
• To resize: Position the mouse pointer on any of the sizing handles that appear on a selected field. When the mouse pointer turns to a doubleheaded arrow, drag in the direction of the arrows to change the size of a form field. To resize a single field or multiple field selections in smaller increments, hold down the Shift key while pressing the arrow keys. You can also resize multiple fields by first right-clicking the field selection and then choosing Size and selecting Height, Width, or Both on the Size submenu. These commands resize all selected fields to the respective height, width, or both of the first selected field.
• To align: Select the field that you want other form fields to align with first and then select the fields you want to align. To align all selected fields with the respective border of the first field selected, right-click the field selection and choose Align and select Left, Right, Top, or Bottom on the Align submenu. Choosing Vertical or Horizontal from this menu aligns the selected fields along the vertical or horizontal axis of the first selected field. \.

Adding Fields to Forms

Although creating a simple interactive form from scratch in Acrobat 6 is certainly possible, most people find that what they really want is to add interactivity to a form that is already set up. For example, say that in the past you’ve paid big bucks to a graphic designer for a logo and spent even more to print reams of forms with your new logo on them. However, now you want people to fill out your forms online to save trees (and money). To do so, you just need to convert your form to PDF and then add the necessary form fields. Acrobat 6 (Professional version only) provides seven different form field tools (Button tool, Check Box tool, Combo Box tool, List Box tool, Radio Button tool, Text Field tool, and Digital Signature Field tool) used to create interactive form fields, and each is covered in later sections of this chapter. The tools are grouped together on the Forms toolbar that you open by choosing Advanced Editing➪Forms➪Show Forms Toolbar. The Forms toolbar appears in its undocked (floating) state, which makes it easy to access when you’re building an interactive form. Like most forms, this example uses numerous cells (such as the Name and Date cells) for writing information in. You need to add fields to these areas so that users can enter data on-screen in the finished product. Fields that you enter text or numbers into are called text fields. Naturally, you create these types of fields in a form with the Acrobat Text Field tool. After you convert your form to PDF and open it in Acrobat 6, use the following steps to add text fields to the form:

1. Click the Text Field Tool button on the Forms toolbar or press F to select the Text Field tool.
(Note that you can display the Forms toolbar, by choosing Tools➪Advanced Editing➪Forms➪Show Forms Toolbar.) The cursor turns into a cross-hair pointer, which you use to draw square or rectangular shapes for your fields.
2. Drag the Text Field tool pointer to draw a box in the desired field area of your PDF form and release the mouse button.
The Text Field Properties dialog box opens.
3. On the General tab of the Text Field Properties dialog box, type a name for the field in the Name text box, and then enter a short description or instruction in the ToolTip text box, if desired.
The ToolTip is the message that appears when a user hovers the mouse over the form field.
4. Choose options for the text field from the tabs provided.
5. Click OK to close the Text Field Properties dialog box.
The field box appears in your document in editing mode, that is, outlined in bold red with its name in the middle of the box. Presto, you’ve added a text form field to your PDF document! Here are some important characteristics of your new form field:

• Unselected fields are colored black but turn bright red when you click the mouse to select them.
• Sizing handles appear on a selected field box to facilitate resizing.
• To edit a field’s name or change options, double-click the field to open its Field Properties dialog box.
• To delete a field, select the field and press the Delete key. Each form field tool creates its own unique form field type — one that can only be selected and edited with the form field tool that created it. For example, you can’t select and edit a radio button form field (created with the Radio Button tool) with the Text Field tool. When you have a number of different of form field types in a PDF document, use the Select Object tool (Tools➪Advanced Editing➪Select Object Tool), which can not only select any one of the seven form field types, but also let you access their specific options by right-clicking a form field and choosing Properties on the context menu. This is much easier than switching back and forth between different form field tools for selection and editing.

When drawing a text field box with the Text Field tool’s cross-hair pointer, make sure to keep the lines of the box inside the boundaries of the cell or line you’ve chosen in your PDF form. This ensures that when a person is filling out the form, his or her data won’t overflow those boundaries.

Introducing Form Fields

The term electronic form is used to describe forms that can be distributed over a computer network (including a company intranet or the Internet). In the old days (before PDF), to create an electronic form, you either scanned an existing paper form into a graphics-editing program or built one from scratch using a word processor or page layout program. Recipients could view these electronic forms only if they had the proper software and the forms were not interactive, meaning that you still had to print one and fill it out with a pen or pencil. At that point, your form wasn’t electronic anymore. What makes Acrobat 6 so fantastic is that, in addition to creating PDF forms by scanning existing forms or developing them right in the program, it also lets you produce truly interactive and portable forms that can be filled out on a computer screen and submitted over a computer network. This amazing feat is accomplished through the magic of form fields. Although some of you might think of fields as those places that keep disappearing to accommodate urban sprawl, for the purpose of PDF forms, fields are containers for specific types of information and interactive elements. For example, the Name box on a form, where you put — you guessed it — your name, is a text field. An example of an interactive element field is a check box or list box that makes it easier for a user to fill out a form by selecting rather than entering data. Adding different types of fields to a PDF document enables you to distribute it online, and users can fill it out in the comfort of their own computer desktop.