textfields not exporting when I export a book to PDF

[-trick]

I have an Indesign book with 15 documents in it.  Each doc has anywhere from 1 to 8 pages a piece with fillable textfields.  When I export the book to PDF (making sure that interactive PDF is selected) I get some fields that work and some that don't.

When I export each doc out individually, then combine them in acrobat, every field works fine.  The problem with this way is my hyperlinked TOC.  I have a TOC that links to docs in the book and exporting each doc out individually screws that up.

So my questions are:

1.)  Has anyone had an issue like the first part?  Where the textfields just don't work?  And how do you fix it?

or

2.)  If I exported each doc out individually, does anyone have an idea how to get the TOC to work?

[Steve Werner]

What PDF viewer are you viewing the text fields in?

[-trick]

Acrobat Pro DC

[Laubender]

Hi,

just tried to work this out with Acrobat Pro/DC.

Had a PDF with a working TOC and no formfields => PDF A
Another one with formfields and no TOC => PDF B

Added pages from B to A.

Then I tried to redirect the destinations to the new added pages from the Destinations List panel.

That step worked. Tested the TOC. The links are going to the new pages with the formfields.

But the final step—removing the old pages where no formfields were present—crashed Acrobat Pro/DC badly.

Exception Type: EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGSEGV)
Exception Codes: KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS at 0x000000000000020

Hm. Currently I have no idea to solve the problem other than to export all documents one by one without any TOC links, combine all PDFs and do the interactivity for the TOC in Acrobat from scratch.

Regards,
Uwe

[-trick]

Some additional info (sorry, I didn't see how to edit the original text)

I'm not using the "official" TOC feature in indesign.  I just used inDesign's hyperlink setup under the type menu. 

The hyperlinks are setup to go to a certain page.  Like click here, go to page 64.  So, if I export every doc out individually it obviously wont take you to page 64 when there are only 5 pages.  But once combined and there are over 64 pages but clicking the link now still doesn't bring us to 64.  In reality every link just bring me to the top of the first page.  

[-trick]

Ok.  so I have a workaround for now.

I moved all the pages into one single .indd file then, in the hyperlink menu I kept the page numbers the same but changed the doc name to the new file I created for all the merged pages. 

Once I exported that out, my links work AND my textfields work.

Still, it's frustrating that the textfields don't all work when exported from a book...

[Jeffrey_Smith]

A few notes:

A link can go to a specific page for HTML5 and SWF, but not for PDF. For a PDF, you would have your link go to a "Destination" which the destination can be a page.

Creating an actual TOC, also creates links automatically and bookmarks with option selected.

[-trick]

Nice!  I didn't know about "Destination".  I'll change that up. 

And the "real" TOC option gives me so much more than what I want.  I just want to link to take me to the first page of every section.  the TOC option brings in a lot of text from each page as well.  At least from what I was getting while using that option.