2 Page Form

First of all are you working in Acrobat Professional or LiveCycle Designer?

If you did the form first in Word then converted it to a PDF file there is a way to add form field quickly in Acrobat Professional by using the form field recognition feature. It does a fair job at recognizing and building form fields automatically with the exception of check boxes most of the time.

I always build my forms from scratch in LiveCycle Designer instead of bringing a PDF into Designer because I think it is more work cleaning it up there and getting things to work.

Tab order in LiveCycle Designer works a bit different than in Acrobat forms and can be tricky to work with some times. So it all depends on how the form is built and saved.

StevenD

I am working in LiveCycle Designer. I did the form field recognition and that works fine. You can tab through the first page fine but when you reach the end it does not go to the 2nd page, instead goes back to the top of the first page.

I need to be able to add something to the form that will make the tabbing continue to the end of the form.

I am also having trouble with the form printing with the information the user enters into it. When you print the form it comes out blank.

Thanks for your help.

Karen

If you care to email me a copy of the form I would be happy to take a look at it and see what is going on.

StevenD

That would be great but I don't see how to attach a document through this posting. If you send me your email address (mine is karen [dot] williamd [at] oberto [dot] com) I will send it off.Thanks again for your help.

Nothing is going to the address I copied from this forum and tried sending. Try sending to

daytonmeister [at] gmail [dot] com

When I opened the form in LiveCycle Designer and previewed it I was able to tab to the second page. I place my cursor in the last field of page one at the bottom and had to hit the tab key several times before it would go to the second page.

Here are some suggestions

1. Tabbing does go to the second page but there are some fields namely button fields that tabbing has to hit before it goes to page two. Even button fields are included in tab order. If you take a look at the Hierarchy panel on the left side of the screen you can see that some of the buttons and fields are out of order. The Hierarchy panel is one of your best friends in LiveCycle Designer. I rely on it heavily. You can select items in the Hierarchy and drag them to another position. Keep in mind that from top down indicates a stacking order. You could put the all of the buttons at the top of the Hierarchy on the first page and all of the buttons if there are any on the second page at the bottom of the Hierarchy. I'm talking about the positions in the Hierarchy panel. The Next Page button can still stay at the bottom of the layout.

2. There are lots of fields in the form and you could stream line it by combining fields and captions so instead of having any captions separate from the interactive fields you could add a caption to the field thereby eliminating an extra and unnecessary field. This is what I do when designing and producing forms in LiveCycle Designer. I try to economize whenever possible. There is a document that talks about increasing performance of LiveCycle Designer forms.

3. I have made it a best practice to name every field and element in my forms. You have some fields that say undefined that you may want to name so you can identify them easier in the Hierarchy. I have found it a big help in the long run to take care of this up front.

4. There are a couple of Script Objects that look like they are empty. I wonder if those can be deleted.

5. I got a warning that the license for Helvetica does not permit embedding. As a consequence Arial was used in it's place. I have pretty much tried to follow the default fonts that are used in the fields in the libraries which is Myriad Pro. Or I will use Arial because I know that most people are going to have those fonts on their computers. Then I can keep the file size down of the form by not having to embed the fonts.

6. Maybe you don't have the option on this form but I find I get a cleaner form if I build the form from scratch instead of importing a PDF made from another authoring application. I just think the whole process of importing and then cleaning up is messy and a lot of work. I suppose I'm a stickler for precision.

7. Did you know that for a selected field you can easily change the field type in the Object panel by selecting the type of field you want to change it to from the drop down? For example you can change an ordinary text field to a date field. When you do that you get these cool calendar controls. Users can either key in a date or click on the little pop up triangle and get a little calendar pop up. That way you don't have delete a field and draw a new one.

As far as printing goes. I entered some data in a few fields on the first page and every thing printed as it should. So I don't know why nothing prints out for you.

I hope these things give you some ideas.