Setting Layout Grid Preferences

Acrobat 6 provides a wealth of tools that make the process of laying out and modifying form fields quick and easy. One of these tools is the Layout Grid —a non-printing, customizable on-screen grid that provides guidelines for drawing field boxes with the seven form field tools. To show or hide the Layout Grid, choose View➪Grid or press Ctrl+U (Ô+U on the Mac). The best part of the Layout Grid, however, is its Snap to Grid feature, which causes field boundaries to snap to gridlines when they’re being drawn, as shown in Figure. To turn this feature on or off, choose View➪Snap to Grid or press Ctrl+Shift+U (Ô+Shift+U on the Mac). Note that because these two features are discrete, the Snap to Grid feature will still work even if the Layout Grid is hidden and vice versa. A check mark next to either command’s name on the menu bar lets you know the feature is turned on.
Layout Grid preferences let you specify a grid’s spacing, position on a page, subdividing lines, and color. Choose Edit➪Preferences or press Ctrl+K (Ô+K on the Mac) to open the Preferences dialog box, and then click Units & Guides in the list box to display the options.
The following options are found in the Layout Grid area:

• To specify the space between major gridlines, click the spinner buttons or enter a measurement in the Width and Height between Lines text boxes.
• To offset the Layout Grid from the top-left corner of the page, click the spinner buttons or enter a measurement in the Grid Offset from the Left Edge or Grid Offset from the Top Edge text boxes.
• To display a specified number of subdividing lines between major gridlines, click the spinner buttons or enter a number in the Subdivisions text box.
• To specify the color of the gridlines, click the Grid Line Color button and select the desired color on the color palette (Windows) or the color picker dialog box (Mac) that appears.

When you’re finished selecting Layout Grid preferences, click OK to apply your changes and close the Preferences dialog box. You’ll probably find that the Layout Grid isn’t really very useful for adding fields to ready-made forms that you’ve scanned into Acrobat 6 because its gridlines will rarely match the cells that are already drawn in your paper form. In these cases, use the Align commands to keep your fields straight. Where it really makes sense to use the Layout Grid is in designing and building a form from scratch. Here’s a quick and easy method of getting a blank page into Acrobat 6 so you can use the Layout Grid to custom build a form: Open a new blank document in Microsoft Word (Windows or Mac) and click the Convert to PDF button on the PDFMaker 6.0 toolbar. You can open the resulting blank PDF in Acrobat 6, configure and display the Layout Grid, and then start cranking out a form of your own design.