Adobe Community: Message List - How to edit text in a form edited in LCD / Acrobat 9?

Re: How to edit text in a form edited in LCD / Acrobat 9?

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Wed, 12 Nov 2014 21:04:47 GMT

I may still have a version of AA9 available to play with. If so, I will try to check things out and see if there are alternatives. Of course, you could recreate the form in Acrobat XI (that is where printing to a new PDF or extracting the info would be useful). You could also try Forms Central that is part of XI. It may be that Forms Central can deal with a LCD form, never tried it (but I tend to doubt it). If you did not use any of the fancy features of LCD forms, you might be better off just transferring it to AcroForms in XI.

OK, I opened an AcroForms file in Designer for AA9 and saved. I then opened the file in AA9 and was surprised that I would edit the text of the form. When I went to edit the form fields it took me to Designer as would be expected. I played around in Designer a bit and could not find a way to edit the text, but the text could be edited in AA9. I think this is what you had described.

I then opened the LCD form in AA XI and found the same result that you did. I was not able to edit either the text or the forms. However, I was able to export the form with most fields to DOCX. The result was pretty good for the form I was working with (suggesting it had reasonable tagging -- but that may also have been done by Designer, I am not sure). There were a few form fields that did not seem to come out, but most did on the 4 page form. I then used PDF Maker to create a new PDF and the result gave most of the form fields, similar to the docx file. It may be that this conversion process might be the most useful, unless you possibly have a form with dynamic fields that is unique in Designer.

Hope that at least clarifies a few things for all of us and gives you some ideas. You might find additional input from the folks in the forms sub-forum.

Re: How to edit text in a form edited in LCD / Acrobat 9?

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Wed, 12 Nov 2014 21:01:10 GMT

How did you change the text in the previous version?

Re: How to edit text in a form edited in LCD / Acrobat 9?

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Wed, 12 Nov 2014 20:59:54 GMT

It was possible to get a free copy of LiveCycle Desogner with a upgrade to Acrobat XI Pro.

Re: How to edit text in a form edited in LCD / Acrobat 9?

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Wed, 12 Nov 2014 20:09:10 GMT

Yes, not mention the fact that even after purchasing BOTH products it now takes 7 steps (plus hours figuring out how) to make a simple change in the text to a form that could be changed in 30 seconds with one step in the previous version.

Re: How to edit text in a form edited in LCD / Acrobat 9?

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Wed, 12 Nov 2014 20:01:23 GMT

Many would disagree. Starting to charge for something that used to be bundled for free can certainly be seen as a step backwards in the functionality of the application.

Re: How to edit text in a form edited in LCD / Acrobat 9?

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Wed, 12 Nov 2014 19:32:23 GMT

It isn't a downgrade. LiveCycle Designer is a separate product.

Re: How to edit text in a form edited in LCD / Acrobat 9?

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Wed, 12 Nov 2014 18:35:12 GMT

Yes, it looks like you used to be able to directly edit the pdf-based "artwork" layer in an LCD pdf.

The painful solution was to:

1) copy the LCD form to a background version

2) select and delete ALL of the LCD objects from the background form

3) use print-to-pdf to create a non-LCD version of the background form

4) clean up the objects from the printed, background pdf form

5) use Acrobat XI to edit the text

6) open the original form in LCD and then Edit -> Replace Artwork to replace the background pdf with the updated version from step 5

7) maintain the background layer for future changes

That's rather annoying since with the old version the only step was:

1) open up the original pdf in Acrobat and change the text

Anyway, thanks for the info. I 'm not sure what the logic behind this XI downgrade was, but it was enough of a painfully negative experience that I'm going to do everything I can do avoid Adobe's pdf products in the future.

Re: How to edit text in a form edited in LCD / Acrobat 9?

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Tue, 11 Nov 2014 09:16:30 GMT

So that's two of us who firmly believed that Acrobat was not to be used on an LCD form. Maybe you found a loophole, and Adobe closed it, perhaps even by accident.

Re: How to edit text in a form edited in LCD / Acrobat 9?

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Tue, 11 Nov 2014 02:34:39 GMT

Once you added the fields in LCD, the form should be an XML form and should no longer be able to be edited in Acrobat, only Designer. I did not use Designer much, but as I understand it you can edit such things in Designer. A not so desirable approach is to either print to a new PDF (of course you would have to add the fields again) or try to export to WORD or HTML (might try both). You would have to recreate things, but might be the best way.

Re: How to edit text in a form edited in LCD / Acrobat 9?

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Tue, 11 Nov 2014 00:09:24 GMT

It was created in both Acrobat 9 and LCD 9. Previously the text could be edited in Acrobat while the input boxes and other objects could be edited in LCD. It seems like now I'm either stranded and need to recreate the whole form from scratch in LCD or downgrade to a prior version of Acrobat.

Re: How to edit text in a form edited in LCD / Acrobat 9?

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Mon, 10 Nov 2014 23:49:09 GMT

How was the text put in? The popular wisdom is that it must ALL be done in Designer, always -- except that when first opened in Designer, Acrobat objects are converted to Designer objects. Everything in the form should be a Designer object, because Acrobat objects cannot exist any more. (Plus, there is what is typed into the form).

Re: How to edit text in a form edited in LCD / Acrobat 9?

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Mon, 10 Nov 2014 23:26:19 GMT

I have LCD, but I can only edit the LCD objects and not the text.

Re: How to edit text in a form edited in LCD / Acrobat 9?

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Mon, 10 Nov 2014 23:22:57 GMT

You need to buy LCD. It's no longer bundled for free with Acrobat Pro.

How to edit text in a form edited in LCD / Acrobat 9?

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Mon, 10 Nov 2014 23:21:14 GMT

So I have a few minor edits to a form that was created in LCD 9 and Acrobat Pro 9. Apparently this seemingly simple task is now impossible with the latest versions. When I try to edit it in Acrobat XI I get the message "This form cannot be edited in Acrobat" but I have no way to edit the text in LCD.

Are users of forms from release 9 really stranded?