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.