InDesign has always been an excellent application for generating forms but, until now, adding the form fields themselves had to be done in Acrobat Professional, a process that could be time consuming, especially if you were creating complex forms. InDesign CS6 now includes built-in form field support, making form creation much easier and faster.
In this example I am using a quote request form for a fictional design company
The form has been designed and text boxes have been drawn in the areas designated for responses.
InDesign form
To convert the text boxes to form fields, select Window>Interactive>Buttons and Forms.
InDesign Buttons and Fields panel
Select a text box and in the Type drop down menu, select the type of field required. Note that it is not possible to select a specific kind of text field within InDesign. Ideally this field would be formatted for dates (dd/mm/yyyy). This attribute must be applied using Acrobat Professional.
Make sure to name the field – this is very important for editing and viewing responses later.
At the bottom of the box, you can set field attributes. As this is a date field, no scrolling will be allowed and the required check box is on, making it a mandatory response.
Continue selecting and defining the fields as required.
Scrolling text field
For the Quote Details field, I have allowed scrolling so the end-user can type as much information as necessary. Specific character limits can be set using Acrobat Professional.
The last question calls for an either/or response i.e. the user must click any one of the radio buttons.
There are two ways to create this. You can simply draw a box and use the Buttons panel to convert it to a radio button. To ensure the correct, either/or response, you need to draw all three boxes, then select them and convert to fields simultaneously. This will apply the same name to them, effectively creating a group of objects.
A second way to achieve this, is to select the Buttons panel menu and select the Sample Buttons and Forms option. This displays a library containing form fields and buttons.
InDesign button and field library
Drag the required objects to the page.
Drag and drop any item on to the page
It may be necessary to scale library objects
On selecting them you will find they have functions already embedded and, in some cases, rollover states as well.
Rollover functions
When you have completed the field specification, save the document and go to File>Export.
Form the Format dropdown select Interactive PDF. From here you will be presented with a screen allowing configuration of the PDF.
InDesign interactive PDF options
After exporting, the PDF is a fully functional PDF form. You can make further adjustments to the fields using Acrobat Professional’s Form editing tools.
Form viewed in Acrobat
What if I have a multi-page document, with dozens of fields, all using options only available in Acrobat, such as rich-text formatting and character limits – and I need to change/update the artwork or text?
I’d have to make the change in InDesign, export, and redo all my Acrobat tweaks all over again.
What a pain.
Is there any way to maintain the Acrobat settings if I ever have to change the artwork?
Hi Jon
The forms capability is new to InDesign in the last version, so it’s kind of version 1 in that sense I suppose.
Previously when making a few small changes to a form designed in InDesign, you would have had to make the changes within InDesign, output it to a PDF, and then start from scratch adding all the form fields etc.. Anybody who has done a few knows only too well how frustrating that could be.
With the latest version you can make the changes in InDesign, output it to a PDF, and all the form fields etc.. are already there, no need to start creating them from scratch in Acrobat Pro. This is definitely a lot quicker than doing the whole lot from scratch every time.
As a brand new feature it might not be perfect (would be nice to be able to set the font type as well as the size for form fields, although that may be dependant on the users system fonts), but it’s a step in the right direction, and for most people makes the process far quicker than it was previously.
As you are outputting a brand new PDF file each time, I can’t see a way you could retain settings that have been made in Acrobat rather than InDesign. It wouldn’t be surprising though if the next release of InDesign extended the forms capability further, and hopefully that will include some extra settings under the pdf options of the Buttons and Forms panel which solve your problems.
Andy
I agree it’s a step in the right direction, but without ALL the form field options available in InDesign, and having to re-tweak each field in acrobat for every artwork change, it’s like getting 9 yards instead of a first down. Close, but I still have to punt.
Fair point, it will certainly be interesting to see what else gets added in CS6.5 / CS7 when they come around.
Hello Jon. You likely have already tried this, but I found a simple time- and effort-saver in my own struggles with this issue. This was to use copy and paste. It’s not an ideal solution – being able to have some sort of “update link” functionality similar to Photoshop et.al. within Acrobat Pro would be useful here. But this basic technique eliminated a bit of the frustration. Mind you, I only had eight Acrobat-derived fields to update on a single pdf page and not dozens across multiple pages….
In my case I had used Acrobat Pro XI to add a simple calculator-like capability (using basic Java scripting that I’m learning) to a pdf that was output from InDesign. Indeed, making follow-on graphical/text changes to the InDesign document and regenerating the “background” pdf does require that the form fields be re-added within Acrobat. In my case I had created eight number-based fields within Acrobat Pro, most featuring a bit of Java script to perform my rudimentary calcuations.
To avoid having to recreate these fields each time I updated the pdf from InDesign, what worked in my case was to simply select and copy all of the text and number fields within Acrobat while working in editing mode with my soon-to-be-updated pdf document. After making my InDesign edits and regenerating the pdf, once back in Acrobat Pro and using its editing mode I pasted the same fields into the new pdf. While they were still selected as a group I repositioned them using the mouse to their proper alignment on the page and resaved the document. The only “fussing” I had to do was to reinsure that the field calculation order was correct…
One set of fields allow the user to enter a set of input numbers, which are then used to calculate and simple Java scripting that I’ve learned is used to output a set of calculated numbers.