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

Select the Prepare Form button in the right side bar.

Open

Select Single File and click Start. Make sure that the Form field auto detection is ON.

Open

If using an older version of Adobe Acrobat Pro, follow these instructions:

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”.

Then, in the next step, select “Use the current document” and then click “Next.”

The form wizard will automatically detect blank spaces in your form marked by underlines/underscores and create text fields.

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.

A box will be automatically created and you will be able to place it in the appropriate space. For this example we will highlight the Employee field.

Once the field is positioned you will be need to name the field. In this example, we will name the Employee field “Employee”. Use the Show All Properties link to see the rest of the properties of the field.

You also have the ability to size the field accordingly to fit within the form the best way possible. Simply drag the box edges to fit the field size. You can also set other properties of the field such as font, size and alignment.

Continue working through the form until all the necessary fields are positioned and named.

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.

1. Select File → Save As

2. 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.

To optimize an existing PDF in Acrobat 8 or 9, select . In Acrobat X or XI, select . In the window that comes up, you can view what content takes up the most space by clicking the “Audit space usage…” button. This breaks down the space usage by category and may be useful for determining what needs to be optimized.

If non-standard fonts are used, then font data is a likely candidate to be taking up space. Make sure the “Fonts” checkbox is checked if this is the case. You can also specify to remove embedded fonts if Acrobat is showing any in the list shown after clicking the “Fonts” checkbox in the PDF optimizer window, then selecting fonts to un-embed. However, be aware that this may affect the way the PDF displays to users who do not have those fonts installed on their computer.

Once you have selected all the optimizations desired, click ‘OK’ and save the file. If successful, you should see that the new file has a reduced file size.