Skip to content
← Share your feedback on Acrobat DC

Settings and activity

1 result found

  1. Square symbols don't always convert to check boxes

    3 votes

    We're glad you're here

    Please sign in to leave feedback
    Signed in as (Sign out)
    Close
    Close

    We’ll send you updates on this idea

    1 comment  ·  Acrobat for Windows and Mac » PDF Forms  ·  Admin →
    How important is this to you?

    We're glad you're here

    Please sign in to leave feedback
    Signed in as (Sign out)
    Close
    Close
    Resolved  ·  Bhavna Negi responded

    The form field detection algorithm is not perfect, and only provides a good starting point.
    You will require manual work to create fields that are not detected by Acrobat

    As a workaround, you could try inserting “Square shape” instead of bullets.
    Click Insert, click Shapes, select a shape, and then click and drag to draw the shape.

    I hope this work for you.

    CreeLoPer27 supported this idea  · 
    An error occurred while saving the comment
    CreeLoPer27 commented  · 

    I had the same problem, from my limited testing I found out that the checkboxes are not getting recognized most of the times because the distance between the checkbox and the text is too large, I have highlighted the distances in your attached image to better show the distances that are ok (in green) and the distances that are too long (in red) and do not allow the checkbox to be recognised.

    If you make that distance shorter they should get recognised (this should also be the same with square bullets as you said you are using)

    I usually personally make forms with a giant table in word with invisible borders to format and place everything, I then make the bottom border of a cell visible (any color seems to work) to make that cell a writable text field (I know you can also put underscores but that approach gives less refined results from my experience), to make it a checkbox field I usually add the word checkbox in the table cell (you can follow this guide if you never used them: https://www.howtogeek.com/204036/how-to-add-check-boxes-to-word-documents/).
    In both cases you need to make sure that the distance between the text describing the text field/checkbox and the text field/checkbox is as short as possible (as shown in the image).

    Another small trick if you are using the "table method" and you can't get the cell with the text describing the text field/checkbox and the text field/checkbox close enough to get detected is to hold "alt" while moving the line separating the 2 cells to get more fine control, if that is not enought either you can trick word into moving the line closer by adding an empty row below and then after that another empty row (2 rows down) where you add with the table drawing tool a line that is slightly closer than your original one, you can then move the original one and it should snap to the temporary one you created below without making the text describing the text field/checkbox go to a new line in its cell.

    In conclusion I would say Adobe seriously needs to improve their automatic form detection/creation algortihms and make things like this invisible maximum detection distance configurable by the user, they should also add support for things like multiline text fields and others.