*** From the Archives ***

This article is from May 30, 2002, and is no longer current.

For Position Only: Getting Hip to PDF Forms

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A few weeks ago in a column about Adobe’s business direction, I mentioned that Acrobat can do amazing things with forms. Allow me to elaborate. Electronic forms may not be the most glamorous use for PDF files, but they’re incredibly useful. You’ve probably encountered them when dealing with the Revenue Service: That agency is reputed to be the largest distributor of PDF documents in the world, with more than 3,000 Adobe PDF forms on its intranet. Only — and I use that word loosely — a couple thousand are available publicly.

But you don’t have to publish forms of the magnitude of the IRS to benefit from making them electronic. Whether designing forms for your own business needs or for a client’s job, there are more opportunities to start creating and using electronic forms than you might realize — for travel reimbursement requests, requisitions, purchase orders, catalog orders, direct-mail response cards, surveys, even print-procurement forms. You can create such forms in HTML, of course, but PDFs offer numerous benefits over their HTML counterparts.

PDF vs. HTML
First, PDF forms offer the design integrity that we’re used to achieving with paper. You can preserve corporate identity and style in a PDF form, so no matter who opens and uses the e-form, it looks and feels just as you intended it. In addition, PDF forms offer flexibility you can’t achieve with HTML: Recipients can complete PDF forms online, or print them out and complete them by hand. With Acrobat Approval, recipients can save the PDFs to their hard drives to complete when they’re ready — online or off.

In addition, forms completed in Acrobat can be spell-checked, and they support digital signatures — neither of which is possible with HTML forms. Also, PDF form data exchanged between server or database and client is generally more compact than HTML form data. The upshot: PDF forms reduce inefficiencies associated with information gathering and processing; potentially prevent miscommunications and costly processing errors; and save the cost of printing and distributing paper forms.

Intelligence and Interactivity
PDF forms can be as simple and “paperlike” or as interactive and intelligent as you desire. By intelligent I mean that depending on the information a recipient enters in one field, the PDF form can update dynamically to reflect the new requirements — necessary for completion or available as read-only, for example — or “spawn” new fields (generate new ones in Acrobat parlance). For this to occur, the form has to connect to a Web server or ODBC database, and the form data has to be transmitted and encoded in Acrobat’s forms data format (FDF), which is also used to store Acrobat comments. FDF allows dynamic form-field updating and can even create entirely new PDF documents by drawing on stored, templated forms, and then populating many of the spawned fields automatically. FDF formatting also lets you control the visual look of buttons, and allows clients and servers exchange graphical information such as digital signatures.

To design e-forms, you can take one of two paths: You can scan existing forms into PDF format, or you can create electronic forms from scratch in a page-layout or forms-design application. Both approaches take time and planning: Even scanned-paper forms require some clean-up, and in either case you’ll have to add interactivity to the form fields in Acrobat itself. Once you’ve completed the basic design, distill the form to PDF — and keep in mind that when producing electronic forms, it’s imperative to embed your fonts. Nothing can corrupt a form’s design like unreadable fonts. In addition, don’t assume your forms will only be viewed online; distill your PDF files at a high enough quality to allow them to be printed a laser printer.

Then in Acrobat, use the Form tool to create text boxes, list boxes, radio buttons, check boxes, signature fields, and more. Click and drag a field on a form, and when you release the mouse button, the Field Properties dialog box will appear. This is where you can define not only the type of field you wish to create but also its appearance and any actions you want triggered when the mouse cursor interacts with it. There are far too many options to cover in this space: Suffice it to say that you can control dozens of aspects of each field, including setting password protections, assigning figure formatting, and performing calculations.

One great timesaver, however: duplicate fields by selecting them with the Form tool and then Control- or Option-dragging it elsewhere on the page, or copy and paste the field to a different page view. Recipients will appreciate duplicated fields because they only have to fill them out once — their information is automatically entered in the duplicate fields, as well.

Before you finish, set up a tabbed order for your form fields: select the Form tool and then choose Tools > Forms > Fields > Set Tab Order. Acrobat will display a numeric sequence of the fields in the document window; to change them, simply click in the sequence that you desire.

Click ‘Submit’
There’s much more you can do with forms in Acrobat, such as letting recipients create profiles of their personal information, including name, address, phone number, birth date, and so on, which can automatically populate those fields every time they encounter your forms. Keep in mind that you’ll need to enlist the help of Webmasters and database administrators — either yours or your clients’ — for some of the technical aspects of e-forms deployment. But now that you have a basic understanding of what you can do with PDF e-forms, you should be able to get the design ball rolling.

 

  • anonymous says:

    Is it really as realistic to distribute forms in PDF format as this writer claims? The recipient needs to have at least a copy of Adobe Approval if they are to store the information in the form fields. Approval costs around £30 a copy, so the form provider would need to spend this amount when sending a form out. Regards Derek (from UK)

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