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Re: PDF Form question

for

From: chagnon
Date: Aug 10, 2018 10:38AM

Joseph wrote:
" When I try to edit the PDF where College Name and Address are, it messes
up the spacing and moves other text around. Is there any way to get this to
work without having to create 25 Word files, then convert and remediate each
form- which would take days. "

You've run into two limitations with the Word-to-PDF workflow. One is a
Microsoft shortcoming, the other is an Acrobat bug.

- Anything in a Word header or footer is automatically artifacted when the
PDF is exported. In cases like yours where the author has placed their
college name (or letterhead information) in the header, the PDF reading
orders/tags leave out that critical information.

You can capture that info in the PDF with Acrobat's Order Panel tool
(formerly called the TURO tool), but you'll have to do that manually for
each of the 25 versions of your PDFs.

Tell Microsoft to give us the option of designating headers, footers, and
other objects as artifacts or live content (like Adobe InDesign does). They
just added that capability to graphics (it's in the new Alt-text dialogue),
but we need it for many more objects and text that are common in documents.
Forum is at https://word.uservoice.com/

-The Edit tools in Acrobat Pro have a major bug; when used, they can destroy
the accessibility (tags and tag reading order get changed) as well as mess
up line breaks and visual placement on the page. That's what is happening to
you.

Editing a PDF will always cause these problems; the only difference is to
what degree and how easily you can correct the changes.

Caution: when editing a PDF, do check the entire PDF's tags and reading
orders. Doesn't matter where you edited the content, the breakage in
accessibility can occur anywhere else in the document, like on page 99 when
the change was made on page 1.

Adobe knows of this bug, but it would be helpful to keep it on their radar
screen via the user forum at https://acrobat.uservoice.com/

Solutions:
1. Your forms idea.

2. Don't put the college info in the header. Just make it live text/graphics
at the top of the page in your Word source documents. If you have multiple
pages in a document, learn how to designate different headers/footers on the
1st page of a document because you'll want the info live on page 1 but
artifacted (therefore in a traditional header) on page 2 and beyond.

3. #2 above, but use a Word Content Control in the source document. Use it
to type in the specific details for each college and then export a unique
PDF for each college.

Hope this helps,
-Bevi

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Bevi Chagnon, founder/CEO | <EMAIL REMOVED>
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