Acrobat Professional is a great program that lets you turn any PDF into a fillable form and print it, easy peasy. Does the court only provide that form one way — as a non-fillable PDF? No problem. You can fix it.

That’s not what I’m here to discuss today. I’m here to talk about how to make do with Acrobat Standard to accomplish the same thing. See, I need to make a PDF form just often enough to need to know how, but not, it seems, often enough to actually remember how it’s done from one time to the next. In Acrobat Professional, it’s straightforward, so not too tough to remember. In Standard, however, form fields can only be created and printed using a workaround.

Acrobat is incredibly — and in my opinion, unnecessarily — complex. So much so that I can’t rely on my memory and keep having to reinvent the workaround. I’m tired of that. So I’m memorializing the information here for both my own benefit and that of my readers. To the extent it makes a difference, I’m using Acrobat 7 Standard, but I’ve included alternate instructions for Acrobat 6 Standard as well.

The problem: Acrobat Standard doesn’t support form-field creation.
The solution: Use text boxes.

First, there are two specific toolbars you’ll need. Right click anywhere in the toolbar area and select “Drawing Markups” (in Acrobat 6, “Advanced Commenting”). Then right click again and select “Advanced Editing.”

Now, create your fields. Click on the text box tool (see graphic at below)

on the Drawing Markups toolbar, then click and drag where you want the text box. No need to be exact; you can resize it later. Next, immediately type the text that should appear in the box. If you click out of the box without typing anything, your box will disappear. If you’re making form fields to be saved and used later, then type one character in the box to hold it there. (I use an asterisk.) You can always delete that when you’re ready to fill out the form.

If the text in your text box looks the way you want it, then fine. If you need to change font, size, or color, then simply select the text. Selection of the text causes the Advanced Editing toolbar to change: It now includes options to change text size, text color, font, and justification.

If your text box appears with a border and you want it borderless (or vice versa), the first click outside the box in any blank area of the document. Next, right-click on the box, and a context menu appears. Click Properties, and there, on the Appearance tab, are your options for border and fill. To make the box border disappear altogether on a white background, set white as the border color.

Once you have the attributes of your text box configured the way you want them, there’s a good chance that you’ll want every text box you create from here on out to look the same. If that’s the case, then right-click again on your box and select Make Current Properties Default.

To resize or reshape the box, single-click on it, then click and drag the handles, just as you would with a box in MS Word.

NOTE: In order to edit the existing text in a box, double-click on the box.

But we’re not done yet. There’s one more hurdle to jump. . . .

The problem: Acrobat Standard text boxes don’t print by default.
The solution: Command them to print.

Sounds simple, right? Maybe so, but this is the part I always forget from one time to the next. Maybe it’s just age.

Choose File, Print. In the upper right quadrant (lower left quandrant in Acrobat 6, “Print What”) of the print dialogue box, just beneath the properties button, there is the phrase “Comments and Forms,” followed by a dropdown menu. By default, “Document” is selected. Change this to “Document and Markups” (“Document and Comments” in Acrobat 6). This causes your text box text to appear in the print preview, and on your printed document.

Setting this option once should make it your default. The trick is remembering what to do if and when your defaults get reset, and suddenly your text boxes no longer print!

BONUS TIP: In order to speed the text box creation task when there are many boxes to create, simply make one box, copy it to the clipboard, and paste it wherever a box is needed. Then resize — and type new content into — the pasted boxes.

NEWER VERSIONS OF ACROBAT: If you don’t have the lastest version of Acrobat Standard 9 which has the full complement of forms creation tools. The tips in this article are for version 8 or lower. Acrobat 9 also has a from wizard which automatically adds form fields for you.  For more information on how to create forms in Acrobat 9 please visit http://www.acrolaw.host.adobe.com/moviepages/forms.html

thanks Rick Borstein for the tip