Designer 8 Forms not following field tab order

[Former Community Member]

I started with Designer auto creating a form based on an existing PDF file and then added additional fields that the auto recognize did not catch. I went through the View Tab Order process and assigned the tabbing order. When viewing the order they are in the correct sequence. When I save the form and then start editing it, the tab key is not following the assigned order given. I have gone back to View Tab Order and it still shows the correct tab order, but does not follow it.



Any thoughts?



Gary Haley

[Former Community Member]

I have the same problem. Got version Acrobat 8.0 Professional.



I have a form with 76 tabs, but even though the Tab Order is set correctly (ie the Tab Order numbers go from 1-76 in the correct sequence), when I go to the Preview PDF, the Tab Order keeps putting the 14th tab last in the cycle.



Do you know how to reset the tab order so that the tab on cell 14 does what its meant to do?



Cheers

Josh

[Former Community Member]

Anyone else besides myself and Joshua seeing this? I see one other topic stream discussing "set focus"?????

[Jared_Langdon]

If all else fails, back up the file and try this. On the XML Source tab in Designer, search on <traversal> and delete all such nodes. This should reset all tabbing order to the default, which is top-left to bottom-right. Now try setting the tabbing order the way you want from scratch.

[Former Community Member]

I've also got this problem. Given some of the much needed improvements I'm seeing, I was taken by surprise by the tabbing order problem. Haven't tried the above work-around yet.

[Former Community Member]

I forgot to post a reply to this with the fix.



I spent a good 40 minutes on the phone with Adobe Support and eventually they found a setting that fixed it.



1) Open the form in Adobe Acrobat (NOT LiveCycle Designer)



2) Go to [ View menu | Navigation Panel | Pages ]



3) Right click on each page with the Tab Order problems



4) In the Tab Order tab, you now see 4 options, and you will also see that "Unspecified" is selected.



The options are

a) Use Row Order

b) Use Column Order

c) Use Document Structure

d) Unspecified



The solution for my document was to change from "Unspecified" to "Use Row Order" option.



Hope that helpd!

[raghavuk]

Thanks Joshua for Your post.

Finally I got the ans. and it works in the same way. It is working with my form prefectly.

Thanks again.....

[Former Community Member]

I am away from my main computer but I thank you for disseminating the solution! I'll post a "success" message tomorrow.. I hope!



Gary

[Former Community Member]

Well I am at my main computer now and while I can open Acrobat 8 Pro and go to View Menu | Navigation Panel | Pages, right clicking on the page does nothing that gives me a Tab Order tab. I get add sticky comments, add bookmark, tool selection (hand/select/zoom), print, document properties, and page display preferences, etc.



Somewhere in trying to find this Tab Order tab, I did open a window (though now I cannot repeat how I did it) that showed for lack of a better description, page attributes. In here I saw 3 different form tags and all my form fields were mixed within the 3 form tags. I was able to click drag all the fields into one form tag and delete the other two. And to my pleasant surprise, the tabbing issue was resolved.



I have not been able to get back to where I was so I have no idea of what I really did (well conceptually I do) or how to recreate it.



So for this particular form the tabbing issue has been resolved but if I build a new form based on an old PDF I am pretty sure I will run into the same problem again.

[Former Community Member]

Ok, I figured out how I got the page attributes. That was View | Navigation Panels | Fields and then selecting the Tags tab. I can recreate this consistently.



I also understand now that selecting Pages was/is supposed to open a similar type window/area to the left of the main document. I was able to this once and get what appeared to be thumbnails of the two pages of my form. When I right clicked on a thumbnail and then selected Page Properties, I saw the Tab Order tab you mentioned. And when going through the 4 different options, the row option was closest to my desired tab order sequence, though none of them gave me my annotated order sequence.



However, I cannot consistently get the Pages panel to appear.



Also, now that I have all the fields under one Form tag, how were multiple form tags generated and can this type data be seen and corrected within Designer?



I really apprecaite the help and I am learning a lot troubleshooting this problem.

[Former Community Member]

Hi,

I want to create pdf from photoshop.. When i use the Save as option the file size becomes huge.. i tried using the Print option, even then the file size is high if i ue the high Quality Print preset.. If i use the smallest File size option then the pdf image quality is not good.. what should i do to reduce the file size of PDF with a good image quality?

[Former Community Member]

This is not the correct forum for this question. However, while you have the Photoshop Save As PDF dialog window up and you have the already predefined presets on top, you should notice on the left is a column of options, the second being compression. Click on this and it will give you control over how large or small the PDF file will be. That is basically controlled by the Image Quality (Minimum, Low, Medium, High, and Maximum) but the other setting impact the overall size as well. You can find what you works for you and then save those setting as your own preset.

[Former Community Member]

Unfortunately, the "View Tab Order" in LCDes seems to be the last used in determining the tabbing order.



We position all fields in the hierachy and try to position based on location (l/r, top/bottom).



My question to those warlords of tab, when adjsuting the tab settings in Acrobat, does this change carry back over to LCDes? I haven't been able to confirm - especially when using an XDP.

[Former Community Member]

When I try this solution the Tab options are greyed out and it looks as though the "Unspecified" radio button is selected. What gives?

[Former Community Member]

I'm using Adobe Acrobat Professional 8....trying to set the tab order for three pages....it keeps setting the tab order back to 1 for each page. I need them to continue the tab order from the first field on page 1 through page three. I've reviewed the posts here, but still can't figure out how to do this. Any suggestions would be helpful. I'm on a windows platform. Feel free to spoon feed!

[gkaiseril]

That behavior is normal, when one tabs through all the fields on one page, tabbing again will take one to the next page.