Highlight fields automatically in a Form

The form highlight field is a Preference in Acrobat, so you'll need to add a Javascipt to the PDF to make sure this Preference is turned on for your form.
You can add the following Javascript to the first page of your Acrobat form (Page Navigation Pane, right-click Page Properties, Actions Tab, Run a Javascript page action.

This turns the form highlighting on and sets the color to yellow.

For LiveCycle Designer forms you'll need to place this javascript code in the "DocReady" event for the form.

I did this in Livecycle and opened my form in reader, but the default color of blue showed instead of the yellow as your code specifies. what might i do to change the color?

thanks,
Brian

The code:

if (!app.runtimeHighlight){...}
Causes the provided script to only use the yellow highlight if the "Highlight Form Fields" is in the not enabled state. If you want to force this not matter what, remove the "if" statement. You will only need these 2 lines of code:

I used this code to turn field highlighting on in one document. Now that color (I used color.blue instead of color.yellow) is the highlighting color for every document I open. I've gone back to the original document and stripped out the Javascript, as well as shut down and rebooted a number of times, but everything is still highlighted in the bright, obnoxious blue instead of the softer, less jarring slate blue.

Any thoughts of things to try short of uninstalling and reinstalling Acrobat? (I'm using 8.1.2 Pro)

Donna

I remember asking this question myself not long ago. Maybe this thread needs to be a sticky?

There should be a scripting reference that you can download from Adobe that has property values for things like highlight color. You should be able to use that to set it to the color you want.

I opened a form with this code inserted:
app.runtimeHighlight = true;
app.runtimeHighlightColor = color.yellow;

and had the same issue. all of the documents opened after the code was entered had yellow highlights. Seems that this will cause your default highlighting in reader to change. If you go to edit , then preferences, under forms, you can change your Fields Highlight color back to what it was originally.

I removed the second line of code and only inserted :
app.runtimeHighlight = true;

and it worked fine to turn the highlighting on and didn't affect the default color.

Whew! Thanks!

Donna

Hi,

we're displaying the PDF document via web browser. We would like to automatically set the higlight fields to TRUE when the form is loaded. We added the code:

app.runtimeHighlight = true;

to doc:ready, form:ready. initialize event but it doesnt work.

Any idea why ?

Also, we found out that if there is an existing PDF document that is opened using Adobe Reader, then above code will work. Seems that it is dependent on my Adobe reader installed in my local machine.

Any help will be appreciated.

Thanks.
Diana

Try placing it on the Layout:Ready event instead. This may be a timing issue because the Initialize event occurs prior to the Layout:Ready event . Layout:Ready is supposed to occur once all fields have been laid-out (rendered) on the form.

Hi Everyone,

Is there a way to "on focus" highlight the field? Or on focus change the fill color so people don't lose what field they are in?