High Level - InDesign Forms

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  • canoe


    I've been tasked to solve an InDesign unknown... and talked to their support team for too long (mostly because they're robotic and have horrible English) but I seemed to have gotten somewhere.

    SITUATION: The client has forklift techs that need to fill out a few text fields on their proprietary software. First Name, Last Name, Date. Those text fields have to populate a PDF.

    Not a big deal. The IT guy wants to know the "form field designations" in the PDF so that the name and date get properly populated.

    In the Interactive Forms IND palette, they have "name" and "description" for your Text Field. However, I guess InDesign, internally, calls them 'textfield1' textfield2 textfield3... going down the page, left to right.

    And in fact these 'textfield1' are the "form field designation" that the IT guy is looking for.

    Has anyone had the flipping great fun of dealing with this crap?

    canoe
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  • monospaced0

    I've done this a ton. I used to do it manually building fields in Acrobat and meticulously naming them so that they acted independently, because the interactive panel wasn't added to InDesign until CS6 2014 or so. You can modify and style them in Acrobat still and see what fields are listed on each page.

    monospaced 0Permalink
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    Dogear
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    • The field "names" come true as they are named in the interactive panel. But the question is... what would the software pick up - name, or internal name...canoe
    • textfield1
      textfield2
      textfield3      canoe
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  • canoe1

    Do you want a consulting gig?

    canoe 1Permalink
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    Dogear
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    • oh ... no thank youmonospaced
    • Can you comment on whether textfield is the correct approach?canoe
    • I'm trying to figure that out.monospaced
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  • monospaced0

    It should just be whatever you've named it in the Buttons and Forms tab. If you want to double check, open it in Acrobat, go to the Forms section of Tools, and click Edit. From there you can see what they're designated as, and you can even change that designation.

    Best bet is to have a trial run with them to work out any issues right away.

    monospaced 0Permalink
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    Dogear
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    • canoe0

      I did the same approach last week - checking in Acrobat to see what shows up. At least we have two options now.

      More to come.

      canoe 0Permalink
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      Dogear
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      • Sorry not more help. It's hard to tell what their proprietary software is actually doing.monospaced
      • It just needs to know how to identify a field... I'll find out soon.canoe
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