Form Fields Blank after save

I have a perculiar problem that has only just started happening.
We fill out forms to send to customers who in turn sign them electronically using a third party service. As of this morning we have been filling out the forms as normal to send, but upon saving the form data disappears (on Mac) and while visible in Windows once it is sent through the third party they come up blank.
I've struggled to find any info on this problem so if anyone can shed any light on this that would be great

Hi George, I've filled out a few fields in the below pdf. I used Pro 9 on a Mac, saved as pdf.
Wonder if this will shed any light on this.
http://cl.ly/4R0T
Also, in regards to the blank one I sent, that happens here too.If I open the file after adding fields it's fine. It's when I pass it on to someone else to view it disappears

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Form Fields Disappear after Editing

I created a simple interactive form from a fairly simply Excel document. After working to create and edit the fields I have them all as I want. When I leave the forms edit mode and save the document as a pdf, all those fields are gone with the exception of a couple of text fields.
All the fields are simple text fields wiht just two needing simple sum calulations.   When I open the saved form and click on hightlight fields, they are not there. When I enter Forms edit mode and click on highlight existing fields, they all appear and their properties are intact. I checked all the fields for accuracy and complete instructions several times.   Perhaps I am missing something in how I am saving the document or something is required when I close each field. None of the fields are locked.
I am using a 27" iMac with 12GB RAM using OSX 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard) and running version 10.1.0 of Adobe Acrobat Pro.   Any advice would be appreciated.
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Jay

Thanks Michael,
I had to do a lot of manual field editing and adding. The root of my problem, however, was me.   I am so new to interactive forms that I did not understand what creating a "hidden" field meant. What I did was hide all fields. I thought that would just hide the name of the field but it hides everything. Once I made them visible, all was well. DUH!!
Thanks for your reply.   It would be great to do calculations in Excel then have them translate into Adobe Acrobat. I am not very good at javascript.
Jay

Form fields rotate after copying/pasting

Hello all, my first post to the forums.
I created a form template in Word/Mac, saved as PDF and brought into Acrobat 8 Pro/Mac to add form fields. Now I want to replace one of the underlying pages. Whenever I replace the page, all the form fields rotate 270 degrees. In addition, if I open up the field properties and switch the orientation back to 0 degrees, the text orientation changes but the size of the form field remains shifted (a vertical vs. horizontal landscape), meaning I would have to resize every field.
I've tried every way that I can think of to make this change, all with the same results...I've inserted a new page and copied and pasted the fields, I've copied and pasted from one document to another...I've replaced all pages of the form instead of just one page. I get the same results on different computers and with different versions of Acrobat (tried 7 and 8).
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I am merely posting this in my frustrations to Adobe in the hopes they read this article and realize it truly is a problem.
>
I am using Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Professional (Version 7.1.0). I have some Word docs I created entirely in landscape format and inserted 1 document (multiple pages) at a time. The Words docs were created using table formatting and the layout was consistent across all documents - merely edited and used Save As for consecutive documents.
>
However, after inserting these docs into Acrobat 7 to add stamps and commenting, my stamps and comments do not copy and paste appropriately between pages. Some pages maintain the orientation, but others rotate the objects - stamps or texts boxes - 90 degrees counter-clockwise.
>
All of the pages were designed the same, inserted in the same way, and have maintained the same landscape orientation throughout. Yet the copy and paste mechanism does not paste the same between pages.
>
I am working on a Windows XP system.
>
Please, please... allot someone to work on this issue.

Reader-enabled form from Acrobat is retaining interactive form fields when user saves the form

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This allowed Reader users to fill out the form and save the results. With the most recent versions of Acrobat and Reader the user saves the form and the data AND the interactive form fields are saved in the resulting file - meaning that the data is still there to be changed. Clearly not what we want and not what Acrobat and Reader were doing previously.
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In some cases we have to supply an interactive pdf for a department that they will then distribute by email to various groups who are expected to fill the form out on submit on an ongoing basis. That is what I was meaning by the user filling out the form, printing it, and then being prompted to save changes.
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If I could force the action of printing as a pdf (rather than saving as a pdf) on submission I think that would solve the issue. The script for most of the forms in the library is xfa.host.print(1, "0", (xfa.host.numPages -1).toString(), 0, 0, 0, 0, 0); and I am not aware of a way to force the print to only be to the pdf print driver.

Form Fields won't save when coworker saves PDF file

I am on Acrobat pro (mac osx), my coworker is on Acrobat Reader 9 (pc, XP). I made some form fields in a PDF file and saved it. Everytime she changes some of the text in the fields and tries to save it won't save the stuff she entered. Everytime she opens it, it contains my orignal field data.
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Use the attribute "binding" instead of a "value". This will remember the value. You can also make sure that you dont have anything in your constructor or class level that initialises that value to "" or null. Because if JSF is remembering your value but your initialization that gets triggered before the page loading resets it to default values then you need to change that part of the code.

How to set a form field that automatically saves as email subject title

I am creating a form in acrobat 9 and want the submit to email button to automatically use the information from one of the text fields as the subject title of the email. So when the client submits the form at the end the PO number they have used will automatically be the email subject. Is there any way to do this? I have found an example created using javascript but I am very much a novice with this so I don't know where to start with this? Any help would be greatly appreciated

Read this tutorial:
http://acrobatusers.com/tutorials/dynamically-setting-submit-e-mail-address

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Software & PDF details:
Adobe Reader 8. V8.1.1
PDF Producer: Toolkit http://activepdf.com
PDF Version: 1.5 (Acrobat 6.x)
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After investigation I have found that:
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Also, I have another PDF with exactly the same settings as above (PDF version and Producer etc), which successfully generates as a result of the software process trigger. This file that works does not change the "Filling of Form Fields" value.
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Ok, that is a useful result, telling us a lot.
Some background you need. Reader 8 CANNOT SAVE FILLED IN FILES normally. To be able to save them they must be specially prepared. This is called "Reader enabling". (In your original message, "rights to enable special features in Adobe Reader") To prepare a file Acrobat can be used, or a server product which has had many names but is currently LiveCycle Reader Extensions. If this is not done, the form cannot be saved, whatever its origin.
Now, a file may not be changed/damaged in even the slightest way after this preparation. This will produce the message seen.
So, your test seems to show
- the original file is OK, undamaged
- by the time the file is delivered from the database to the user it has been damaged/changed.
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(To clarify: this only applies if you used Windows Explorer to save the file, NOT any save function in Reader; if you saved in Reader please repeat the test with Windows Explorer).
Message was edited by: Test Screen Name

Is there any api to modify the form field in PDF?

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Hi,
What I need is to modify some form fields' property, I explore some web and found before I create the PDF file, I can set the security of the PDF:
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Web Service do not work after save in Designer ES2 SP1

Dear all,
I am trying to migrate 8.2.1 process to ES2.
Although it have some bugs, but the process are working fine when using ES2 without any SP.
One day we installed SP1 for ES2 and hopeing for some bugs we found fixed, but find none of them fixed... oh well, so we continue the migration.
And the problem happen when we try to modify the form for some testing, we find that even we *did not* modify anything in the form, if we pressed the save button and deploy the form, all the web service related code in the form will stop working.
Anyone have any idea about this?
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Bill

Hi Paul,
Thanks for the suggestion.
Already tried to update the dataconnection by right click at data view, and choice "Refresh Data View", but that doesn't help, would like to know are there any others way to do so?
I already open a case with the support, but it seem that the engineer in APAC region have a very slow response time...
Just wonder if I can send the case to others support center with better response time.
I tried to compare the form before and after save and find that some information may missing in the post-SP1 form.
In the pre-SP1 from, I can find a <dd:dataDescription> section for every web service used in the form, but in the post-SP1 form they are missing.
I tried to add that section back and it will make the web service usable again, but the problem is I need to do that every times I modify anything, and I also need to create this section for a every new web service added to the form...
Regards
Bill

Fields disappear after using the Reduce size save in X pro

My many form fields literally are gone after doing a save as>Reduce File Size command in the new Acrobat X Pro.
I have many pages that I have anywhere from 30 to 50 interactive fields to fill in, I had tested the forms closed the file reopened and then because the file size was a bit more than I have seen in the earlier version of Acrobat, so I used the Save as>Reduce file size command on all my pages after seeing in the folder that my interactives went from 1050 KB to around 500, so I did every form one after the other.
Well when I went to start loading them in to FTP and testing them after placing on the web when clicking on the PDF it has no fillable fileds, well I thought what, so I opened that same file on my computer and nit came up the same, and the last thing I had done before starting to upload was to do the Reduce File Size command.
To have all my fields wiped out like this is crazy, I have no way to recover them from what I can tell, unless Adobe has a miracle fix, which I'm hoping.
I can't find any setting that says it removes form fields upon save!
Can somone tell me what has happened and maybe why, I have doing these type forms for years and have never had this happen, I'm Wary of this new Acrobat, I can't see the old history menu, where you could see pdf's that you created a month ago or more. Why does that screen stay on in the center of the program all the time, most of those have a close box that you can get rid of it. Is there a way to turn on the old 9.0 menus everywhere, and can you move the right side column to the left side somewhere, it just is easier for me to use.
Things seemed to work relatively good in the old version, why some many drastic changes, it ends up slowing my production down, and now i'm behind on my work load.
I'm all for improvments, but really why change everything, it seems counter productive even for Adobe, unless someone is trying to justify their employment.
I apologize really frustrated here.
Any help to recover would be great.

Thank you LoriAUC, it was definitely the Reduce File Size command. Although I have used the Optimizer in the past in older versions of Acrobat I did not use it in this case.
I have been doing this exact same work with Acrobat from the days of Live Cycle or what ever it was called, and just a few weeks ago I was creating the same interactive's using the same files for a different client, using the Acrobat 9 pro I believe in the built in "Forms" builder.
I think where I may have screwed up is I had always done my Reduce File Size before I made the form interactive, this time I happened to see that each page was over 1 MB and I know that the non-interactive version that I also post on our website is more like 200 KB, so when I saw that they were over 1 MB, I decided that I was going to use the Reduce File Size after I had finished all of my 13 pages of interactive's.
I did not think to check the first one to see that the interactive was still functional, and proceeded to change all of them by quickly opening doing the save as reduce file size and then closing, and it took a whole 3 minutes to undue/ ruin the hours of building the pages with the 30 to 50 field areas that were interactive.
I don't wish to replicate it right now, but I will attempt a test with some made up test files to verify when the deleting of the fields took place, because there was data in the fields, but it was now flat and when you click on the edit in forms, it asks if you want to have the wizard place fields because no fields are in the document, or something to that effect.
I will let you know the outcome of my experiment.
If you come up with any other info I would be very interested.
Thanks again for the help.
Sincerely,
Omnia Guy

Blank form fields with data?

I've created a form in Acrobat and sent it to a few people to test. When they send it back to me, some people say even though they saved their data, when it's previewed in their browser (email) it looks blank. When I receive forms sent back to me, the form appears blank, but when I click in the field, the answer appears.
How can I fix the form so that no one is confused by a blank form after they fill it out? I'm not concerned about receiving the blank forms since there is data, I'm more concerned that a customer will see a blank form after they've filled it out and get frustrated.
BTW, we've tried opening the forms returned to us in MAC and PC, same problem.
Thanks,
D

The problem occurs when the Preview application on a Mac is used to fill-in the forms. It is well known the Preview corrupts PDFs in a number of ways and it should be absolutely avoided when using PDF forms. The damage it does to a document cannot be repaired, but you can open the corrupted form in Acrobat, export the form data (to an FDF or XFDF file), and import it back into a blank form. Then inform your users to use Adobe Reader and not Preview.
Also, some PDF viewers (e.g., iOS's built-in viewer) have no support for PDF forms at all, so forms will appear blank when opened. The fix for this is to have them open the form in Adobe Reader. This is assuming the form was not corrupted with Preview.

Save Forms Fields PDF with information un-editable

We created a simple 5 form field PDF invoice for a client to edit and send out to customers. They want to be able to edit the fields, but then save the resulting PDF with the input information to be un-editable but the end customer they are sending the invoice to. Is this possible?

Will the client be using Acrobat or just Reader? If just Reader, you can lock the fields after they are filled-in by making them read-only, which will require a script. You should also set the default value of each field to the current value of the field, which prevents clearing the form if the user resets the form. There's an older topic from several months ago that discusses this in more detail. If you can't find it, post again and I'll try.
If they will be using Acrobat, a better approach is to flatten the form fields, which converts the field apperances to regular page contents, removing the form fields in the process. You can flatten fields with Acrobat using JavaScript, PDF Optimizer, or Preflight. Post again if you need help with this.

How can I add form field value to the file name in save as dialog box

I do not want the form to be saved automatically, just want the form to auto populate the "file name" only.
A little background on the forms I want to use: My company has 70 retail outlets, I'll use one of our pdf forms called an "Incident Report" as an example. I would like for a store manager to be able to complete the form, then email the form to the main office (I already have javascript to add field values and form name to the email subject line), once the main office receives it, I want for them to be able to file the pdf electronically on our server. We have mutliple forms that we use so I do not want any of the forms to automatically save anywhere, (at this time anyway) I just want the office personnel to be able to click "save as" (or whatever they will need to click) and the form automatically add certain field values from the pdf they have received, of which will be different each time the form is sent to the office (Date, store #, employee name etc.) in addition to the name of the form in the "File name" of the "Save As" dialog box. The main office employees will decide into which server file the pdf should be saved.
I'm using Acrobat 8 professional, the stores and office personnel use Adobe reader.
One little note: We currently print and file a lot of paper on a daily bases, as soon as I can get this to work, we are going green.
Me and a lot of trees in this will really apprecitate any help you can give with this! :-)

You might want to take a look at the document "Developing Acrobat Applications Using JavaScript" (js_developer_guide.pdf) which is part of the Adobe Acrobat SDK, which can be downloaded here. Read the "Privileged versus non-privileged context" (p. 45ff.). You will find an example for "Executing privileged methods in a non-privileged context". Should be almost exactly what you are looking for.
Small Outline: For security reasons ("the user always has to know what's going on") you are not allowed to use the "Doc.saveAs"-method without the user permission (--> in a non-privileged context). In order to reach the goal of a privileged context you can use a trusted function. You do this by creating a JavaScript file (*.js) in either the Application-JavaScript-Folder (default location on Windows systems: "%ProgramFiles%\Adobe\Acrobat 10.0\Acrobat\Javascripts") or the User-JavaScript-Folder (default location on Windows systems: "%AppData%\Adobe\Acrobat\10.0\JavaScripts"). Add the following content to the new file:
myTrustedBrowseForDoc = app.trustedFunction( function ( oArgs ) {
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          var myTrustedRetn = app.browseForDoc( oArgs );
     app.endPriv();
     return myTrustedRetn;
myTrustedSaveAs = app.trustedFunction( function ( doc, oArgs ) {
     app.beginPriv();
          var myTrustedRetn = doc.saveAs( oArgs );
     app.endPriv();
     return myTrustedRetn;
The developer guide actually wants you to add this content to the existing "config.js" file. I recommend creating a new file, since its easier to deploy in a network. Either way, every client/user who needs to be able to save documents this way, needs this JavaScript Code in his Application/User-JavaScript-Folder.
Within the Acrobat Document, which you want to obtain a certain file name, you can now use the trusted functions "myTrustedBrowseForDoc" and "myTrustedSaveAs" to store the file. To call the trusted functions and deliver the file name you can either you use a form field (button) or you add a new menu item. Add the following JavaScript Action to the button/menu item and change "Roller Coaster" to the name of the field which contains the value which you want to become the new file name:
var fileName = this.getField("Roller Coaster").valueAsString;
try {
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     try {
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     catch(e) {
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catch(e) {
console.println("User cancelled Save As dialog box");
Good Luck!

Using javascript to save a pdf to a different directory and generating a new filename based on form fields in the document.

I have built the following script in an attempt to create a submit button that will automatically save the document in a different directory on my computer. It will also use the form field data "customer" and "date" to generate the filename. I printed out the variable myPath and it looks like it printed the correct string. I keep getting the following error:
TypeError: redeclaration of const path
any help would be much appreciated.
var customer = this.getField("Customer").value;
var date = this.getField("Date").value;
var path = "C:/Users/awilliams/My Documents/Test/"
var reg = date.match(/(\d+)\/(\d+)\/(\d+)/);
var myPath= "C:/Users/awilliams/My Documents/Test/" + customer + "_" + reg[1] + "." + reg[2] + "." +
reg[3] + ".pdf";
this.saveAs(myPath);

"path" is a keyword within a PDF you should not use keywords as a name for any other object as a general rule.
Have you checked the PDF Reference to see how to create a file path name within a PDF, 3.10.1 File Specification Strings page 118?
Did you carefully read the Acrobat JavaScript Reference for the saveAs method?
The notes following the description:
Note: This method can only be executed during a batch or console event. See Privileged versus non-privileged context for details. The event object contains a discussion of JavaScript events.
(Adobe Reader S): This method is available in Adobe Reader for documents that have Save usage rights.
How to Save a PDF with Acrobat JavaScript

Form Fields Blank after save

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