AcroForms Best Practices

Jim and I have put together a Best Practices for Acrobat forms.

Here are some of the design basics:

Design Practices:

A form’s design can save hours of tedious conversion work in Acrobat. Here’s a few tips to keep in mind:

• Keep it simple

• Use type between 10 to 24 pt.

• Use plenty of white space and separator lines between form areas. Especially important is the space between lines (leading). Use double-space in Word, twice the point size of the type in InDesign or other page layout programs.

• Avoid background colors other than white

• Minimize the number of fields and keep the data organized

• Avoid drop shadows, transparency effects such as halos and glows, and graphics on text labels.

• For more complex forms, number the fields in either the Fields panel or Field Properties dialog (see below).
• Use the Field panel and cursor (arrow) key (down) to check tab order. Here’s where numbering fields is useful.  

• Use lines or boxes for text fields. See examples on following pages (download the PDF). Use circles for radio buttons and boxes for check boxes. Numbered items become radio buttons. Use the following examples to test and note how the Forms Wizard reacts. In Acrobat, select Document > Extract the form pages to test and reuse. The form examples were created in Word.

Click here to download the Forms Best Practices PDF.