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form information copied when combining PDFs in Acrobat 7

JohnCang
Registered: Jan 24 2008
Posts: 2

I have created a fillable form by converting a word doc to a pdf and adding
form fields and check boxes.

All went very well as I made 5 copies (same form, each with different
information) and saved each as its own pdf file.

Then I tried to combine all the forms so the reader would receive only one
file with 5 pages of the same form, all with different information.

But the result was I got 5 pages of all the same information- I believe the
form fields are just copied from the first document to all the others.

Is there a way to " shut off" the form fields once the information has been
entered or is there an easy way to combine these?

If you have the time to answer this I would really appreciate it.

Thank you,
John

My Product Information:
Acrobat Pro 7.0.9, Windows
thomp
Expert
Registered: Feb 15 2006
Posts: 4411
In Acrobat Forms (AcroForms), all form fields with the same name share the same data. When you combined the forms the fields combined.

The are a couple things you could do. The essiest is to flatten the forms before combining them. There is free tool for flattening at

http://www.windjack.com/products/freestuff.php

Flattening a form pushes the form field apparence into the regular PDF page content and removes all the fields. This is great for printing, but means the data can no longer be extracted programatically from the PDF.

The other thing you can do is a bit more complex, renaming the fields as the forms are combined. For this you'll need to write a folder level script that combines the forms by using page templates. The page template "spawn" funciton has an option for renaming fields. But I wouldn't do this unless this is a frequently used workflow.

Another way to do this is not to combine the files, but place them all in the same directory folder and use an Acrobat batch sequence to do the printing.

Thom Parker
The source for PDF Scripting Info
www.pdfscripting.com
Very Important - How to Debug Your Script