Printable Scrolling text – Needle in a haystack

Hi mmoxley,

The only way to do this with an AcroForm ( a form made with Acrobat's form tools) is to make your entry boxes large enough to cover all cases or to limit the text entered and let end users know what the limits are in each case.

However, with an XFA form (LiveCycle Designer form) you can have dynamic, expandable text fields that flow and will print all text regardless of how much is entered. In this case, you would not even get a scroll bar. As more text is entered, the field itself will grow to accomodate it. Since you have Acrobat Pro 8.1 Windows version you also have LiveCycle Designer (included with your Acrobat purchase).

If you don't want to go the LiveCycle Designer form route, your only option with AcroForms is to make the fields large enough to cover all bases.

Hope that helps,

Dimitri
WindJack Solutions
www.windjack.com

OK, I attempted to use LiveCycle designer, but I guess I have not attempted correctly.

When I make a text field, what option do I use to make it dynamicly resize? Or is that what the section and subsections are for?

I guess this is more for the LiveCycle forum, but I continued off the last post. Thanks in advance.

Hi mmoxley,

See my reply to this in the LiveCycle Designer forum.

Hope that helps,

Dimitri
WindJack Solutions
www.windjack.com

Hi,

I think I have a similar problem. I have a PDF of a textbook that I wrote. I don't know what the original software was that created the material, but I had the company download the book in PDF. This was in 2004 if that makes any difference.

I had the company, now out of business, download the 2 versions of the textbook. One is the student version and the other is annotated instructor's edition (AIE). In the AIE version, some of the pages do not show the annotations, which are for the most part answers in the exercise sets.

When I use Examine Document and view Hidden text > Show preview > Show both hidden and visible text, the page is shown the way the AIE should be other than color. What I would like to do is to save a copy of the AIE that show the hidden text when it is opened and will also print the hidden text.There are no layers and I have tried some different commands in preflight, but have not been successful. I could use some guidance on how to make the hidden show and stay shown.

If you would like to view a sample of the PDF that I am referring to, you can go to http://bjkp.com > eBooks and download the sample. Page 54 of the sample material would be a good example to look at. The document is not locked.Thanks, Terry

Hi,

This is what I have so far. Below are a few fixes that work on some of the pages. These fixes may be all that someone reading this thread needs. I can fix the documents in the section on http://bjkp.com labeled eBooks, but the documents in the sections Educational Software and Print Textbooks will not work with any of these methods. I can see the AIE text material, but I cannot show it. Does anyone have a fix for those pages?

The most perplexing pages are clean looking text in the Print Textbooks section. They have no buttons and, as with the others, the AIE is hidden below. You can go to http://bjkp.com > Print Textbooks > Elementary Algebra 4th Edition with Applications > El Alg 4th Textbook. Three examples to look at would be page 54 (78 of 208), 103 (127 of 208), or 127 (151 of 208). The document is not locked.You can also go to http://bjkp.com > Educational Software > Educational Software and download the sample entitled Beginning Algebra 5.0 Chapter 3. Two examples to look at would be page 206 (22 of 46) or 215 (31 of 46). The document is not locked. If you can get the AIE to show in the Print Textbooks section, I think the same steps would work for the Educational Software section. In fact, if you can get the print section to work, I would not need to use the Educational Software to make an AIE version.Some methods that work on the eBook section are:

Method 1 – In my situation, the AIE materials are covered with white-filled empty text annotations - so if I print the file with "Document" instead of "Document and markups" selected on the print dialog, the AIE materials all appear. If when I go to print, I change from a printer to Adobe PDF, the file is saved without the white boxes and the AIE showing.

Alternate to method 1 – The 'hidden' text is actually text with visible font that is masked by a white filled text box (a text box that has no text). Text boxes are comments. Open the comments panel where you may examine, sort, show (filter), search and delete any or all comments. If the goal is to delete all masking comments, with careful sorting and filtering you can identify and select the masking comments. You can delete them one by one or by subsets or by all at once. With a ctrl+a plus delete, you can select and delete all filtered and displayed comments. You will need to experiment and get the hang of filtering and sorting masking comments for deletion.

Alternate to method 1 – A fix that works on some of the pages is to select the Object Select Tool > Ctrl+A the fields get selected > delete, and then use the TouchUp Object tool to delete the buttons. Unfortunately, this only works on some of the pages.Method 2 – To remove all the annots from the PDF, use Preflight > single fixups > search for "annot" to pull up the "remove all annotations" fixup, and run it. This will also remove buttons and links, but you can create a new Profile that only reacts to text annotation types if you need to.Best regards, Terry