I had been working on a credit application form that had been driving me nuts with getting the tab order right. I had originally used the the auto-field placement function in Live Cycle 8.0 when I imported the original PDF, which worked for 90% of the fileds I was working with. I still had to manually create and group several radio button lists that Live Cycle had missed.
I was at the point of putting some final polish on the form and that's where I ran into trouble with the tab order and the new fields I had created. No matter what I seemed to do, the fields I created did not integrate smoothly with the tab order of the rest of the document. I had gone so far as to try to tweak to XML code. That got me a little further but never really fixed the tab order. It almost seemed random at times.
After perusing the AUC forums, I got the impression that the tab order controls were much improved with Live Cycle 8.2. I purchased and installed the upgrade, and Man! what a difference. Now I could tab through the fields in the exact order I had set up.
There was one issue left though, and that was where the tab "landed" when I would tab into a radio button group. For one group, it would hit the first item as I expected. For another it would hit the second item, and on another it would hit the last item.
After playing around with several settings in the Object pallet, I remembered that default tab order went from top-down and left-right. I thought it couldn't be that though as I had been sure to align my radio buttons straight across, albeit manually. I go to Window->Layout and start going through the buttons in one group that was giving me problems. I noticed that the Y-coordinate of the second box was slightly, and I mean thousandths-of-an-inch slightly, higher that the others. I make the Y-coordinate the same as that of the other buttons, switch to preview, start tabbing and Son-of-a-B* if the tab didn't land on the first button as it should have done all along!
I went through my other radio buttons and found more buttons that had Y-coordinate values higher than the other buttons in their group and corrected them as well. There were even two radio button groups that I actually had to set the offending button to be .0001 of a inch lower than the other buttons, but the end result was that the tab order for the document finally worked that way I wanted.
I hope by posting this I've saved someone some unnecessary stress.
The answers are out there. Maybe you have them.
The reader will move from left to right top to bottom so if the field on the right is higher than the one on the left the one on the right be read first.That is an incredibly irritating problem which is why I'm almost obsessive about making sure that all fields are aligned correctly.
One way to approach this, that I find helpful, is to change the settings in the Drawing Aids menu.
Change the units value to centimetres and the X and Y intervals to 10. Another thing to bear in mind is that sometimes the X and Y co-ordinates are not always visible and can be blank and grayed out. In this case you can check the location by clicking on the field and looking at the co-ordinates listed at the bottom of the page.