Overview
For this process you will need Adobe Acrobat Pro 9.0 or greater and you will need a PDF file to work with. Acrobat is used to publish your documents, rather than to create documents from scratch. You can create a PDF file from a source document such as an MS Word document. Once you’ve created the PDF file from your source document, you can use Acrobat to add features to it, such as bookmarks, annotations, form fields, and so on. In this article, we will be focusing on creating form fields and saving/optimizing your file
Open the Document
First open your PDF document in Acrobat (File menu → Open).
Adding Form Fields
We’ll walk through two methods of adding form fields: using the wizard to auto-generate form fields and manually adding form fields. Make sure the fields you are adding are text field types.
Auto-generate fields using the wizard
Go to Forms menu → Start Form Wizard. Once you’ve selected “Start Form Wizard,” you’ll be prompted to use an existing file, scan a paper form, or create a PDF from scratch. Select “Use an existing file” and click “Next”.
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After it does this, you can resize, edit, or remove the fields as needed.
Manually add form fields
Go to Forms menu → Add or Edit Fields. This may be under the Tools menu under Forms depending on what version/platform of Acrobat you are using. Once the FORM tool is open you will be able to add fields. Select the Add New Field – Text Field option.
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We recommend naming fields so that they are clear and easily identified. The names that you use here will be read by Cognition when you upload the PDF Template. Cognition has a User Interface for mapping the form fields to the data points that will populate the form for each user.
Saving the Form
Once you have completed your form you need to Close Form Editing. Now you can save your form.
Select File → Save As
Choose the format: ADOBE PDF FILES, OPTIMIZED
Optimizing PDFs to reduce space usage
Because a PDF document may be archived in large quantities, it is important to keep the file size as low as possible. Be sure to stay away from large graphics when possible, as they will increase the size of the final PDF. File size can also be kept low by making sure to use standard fonts when creating the PDF, especially for text fields.
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