Create text fields

- [Garrick] When you're adding form fields to a PDF, you need to determine what type of form field is best suited to the question being asked. So it's your decision whether you're going to be using a text field, or a drop-down list, or a check box or a radio button or whatever. Usually it will be pretty obvious which tool you'll need to use thou. For instance, here on the left side of the form, it asks for the name, the city, the address, state zip, and so on. The best sort of field for this is a text field, which is a field that allows the user to type in whatever information that they want. So with this part of the form on screen, I'll come up to the toolbar, I'll find the text field tool, select it, and when I bring my mouse back over the document, notice I now see the text field attached to it. Now there are two main ways I can place this text field. First I can line it up where I want it to be, and then click, there's my field, and I'm given the opportunity to name it right away, which is always a good idea, so I'll give it the same name as the line I placed it on. I'll call it full name. I always try to avoid spaces and special characters just in case my form fields are going to be submitted electronically. Spaces can sometimes cause problems in processing field data. We also have the option here to make this a required field. Meaning you can set this field so that the user will be alerted if they don't complete this field. I'll leave that unchecked for now, but I do want to resize the field a bit so it's the same length as the dash line on the document. So I'll just place my cursor here and drag that to the right. All right, so that's one way to place a text field. I'll click the text field tool again, this time instead of clicking to get the default text field, I'm going to click and drag. So I'll place my cursor right about there, and then click and drag. This allows me to size the text field right away. And I'll name this address one. Now these two fields are both slightly different sizes in terms of their height, as we'll see later, the height of the field can determine the size of the text inside them. I want them to be consistent here, so I'm going to Shift + Click both fields to select them. Now it doesn't look like they're both selected at the moment, but they are, and because I want the height of the first field to match the height of the second, I'm going to right click the second field, and here you'll find the option to set fields the same size. You can choose to match the height, the width, or both. In this case, I'll just choose height and now they match. And I'll just drag this first one down a little bit so it's more on the dotted line, like so, and I would just continue working my way down this section of the form adding text fields. Now, for the next field address line two, instead of creating the field from scratch with the text field tool again, I'm just going to start dragging this address field down, but then I'll hold down Option here on my Mac to create a copy of that field. On Windows you'll hold down Control as you're dragging. And if you have the Shift key, you'll be able to keep the copy lined up with the original. I'll release my mouse key before I release the keys on the keyboard, and there it is. So that allows me to create a copy of the field with the same properties as the original. And I can do the same for the next line. Now let's make that a little wider. Now, of course, I should rename these new fields too. I'll do this by double clicking the field to open up the properties window, and we'll call this address two. It's important to give each of your fields a unique name, especially if you're going to be exporting the field data later. And while I have this window open, I can click the city field, and change its name too. And while we have this open, let's take a look at some of the other properties here. Under the general tab where we currently are, below name, we have the option of including a tool tip. The tool tip is what appears when the user rolls their mouse over that field. So you can type anything you want in here, that you feel might help guide the user to fill out this field properly. So I might type, enter city name here. So that when the user rolls over this field, that text will appear, and we'll see that in just a moment. I'll go to the appearance tab next. By default, there is no border color or fill color. If I wanted to, I could make an actual box in here by turning on the border and I'd see an outline there. And if I wanted to fill it in with a color, I could click there as well. And that might be useful if you're adding fields to a form where there aren't any lines or boxes, but in this case we already have these dash lines on the form. Now under the font area, you can leave the text at the default size, or you can have the option to set it to auto. This is going to allow the text to resize if the text in the field gets so long that it reaches the end of the box. The text will become smaller to be able to fit more content within that form field. You can also choose a font here, but I'll just leave Helvetica and the text color will be black. And those are the properties I'm going to be concerned with for the moment so I'm going to go ahead and close this, and I'll test my form so far by clicking preview. By default Acrobat highlights every available form field in this sort of periwinkle or purpley color, so you can easily see them. If you want to turn that off, you can go to Acrobat preferences, or if you're on Windows go to edit preferences, and with forms selected here on the left, you can uncheck show border hover color for fields. I'm just going to leave that on for now though so I'll just cancel that. But now I can test my fields by clicking in say the name field, and I can type my name, I can press tab to jump to the next field. If I place my mouse over the city field, I see the tool tip that I added to that field. This is also the field where I set the font size to automatic, so I can start typing in it. But if I keep typing text in this box, notice it keeps getting smaller. I'll just delete that extra text. But you'll need to determine for yourself which fields on your forms need a fixed font size and which you should let automatically size. All right, let's click edit to go back to the editing view, and here I'm just going to quickly drag out copies of the remaining text fields. Going to hold Option on the Mac or Control on Windows, I'll make a copy there and resize it, another one here, one for country, and one for email address. Now, you'll notice that the city name has also copied into these fields because it was present in that field when I made each copy. But this lets me show you something else important. Each of these five fields is still named city. I'm going to click preview again, and if I delete the city name from any of these fields and press Enter, notice it disappears from all of them. That's because they all have the identical name. Similarly, if I type into any of those fields and press Enter, the text appears in all of those fields. So that's why it's important that each field have its own unique name. Delete that, and I'll go back to edit. So I'll quickly rename these fields now. in this case, I also want to delete or modify the tool tips since those got copied over as well. So I could change out the state, select this one, I'll call this one zip, I'll just delete these 'cause it will be faster, and I'll close that. Now, if you look over here to the right, you can see a list of all the fields I've added. Clicking any field here highlights it in the document, which can be useful to quickly locate a specific field out of the dozens that you might've added to your document. All right, so that's the basics of how to add text fields. But when creating a form you'll often want to restrict the type of content that can go into a text field. For example, you might want to set up these zip code field to only accept numbers. And we'll take a look at how to do that next.