“Required” glitch in CS 6 Text Forms
A tiny bug in the creation of text forms in CS 6 allows Required fields to be submitted or printed without being filled in.
One of the major new features in CS 6 is the addition of PDF forms. These allow you to add forms to your InDesign file before exporting as a PDF.
Unfortunately a tiny bug slipped by the team and got into the finished product:
If you apply the “Required” label to a text field, the field is indicated as required in Acrobat, but there is no alert when the user goes to submit or print the form. The Required setting is essentially disabled although it is checked in Acrobat. Worse, deselecting the setting and then reapplying it in Acrobat doesn’t fix the problem.
The easiest way to fix this problem is to not apply the Required setting to a text form field in InDesign. Then, when you open the the file in Acrobat you can apply the Required setting without any problems.
Fortunately this bug only applies to text form fields. Setting Required to any of the other form objects works correctly.
Those “jolly folks” at Adobe are well aware of this bug and thoroughly expect it to be fixed in an update at a future date.
This article was last modified on December 21, 2021
This article was first published on June 16, 2012
