I'm having this problem, too. So far, none of the suggestions here has worked to fix it, but I figure one more case's worth of details might be helpful to someone, somewhere.
I'm working in Acrobat Pro 8.1.1 and LiveCycle 8.05etc on a PC running Windows 98. The original layout was created in InDesign 5.0.1 and PDF'ed, then the form fields and checkboxes were added in Acrobat. My form has 51 fields and checkboxes. The current version's fields and boxes were created in the order in which they need to tab (at one point, I thought that some sort of order might carry over from Acrobat's construction and made sure of this). I used the "create form" option in Acrobat to make a PDF-artwork form to edit in LiveCycle. In LiveCycle, because the automatic tab order bore little relation to the one I need, I used "Set Tab Order" to change it.
The tab order view shows the numbers in the right places, and -most- of the tabs do change their order. After the 39th item, though, the tab leaps over two short columns' worth of fields and boxes, to the -second- item in that column, then the third and fourth, jumps to a nearby field, then comes back for the first one. It jumps to the right and does another column of checkboxes correctly, but finishes up with a column of fields in -reverse- order.
So far, I've tried mixing up the tab order, then going back to the right one. I've saved-as; I've saved a copy. I've enabled user rights in Acrobat, saved, closed, reopened, etc. (the Felicity method). I've examined the traverse parts of the XML to see whether they point to the correct next item (they do). I've checked the hierarchy to see if the fields are in the right order (they are). I've checked the structure to see whether everything is tagged (only one was missing), and in the right order (it is). The only oddities I found were the one untagged field and a couple of fields out of order in the XML. The untagged field was in the messed-up-tab area (though not the first item that goes wrong), but the XML swap wasn't.
In desperation, I even opened up the PDF file in Notepad and searched for all appearances of the field labels in the problem section. They appear in the correct order -in all places- and the traverses point where they're supposed to.
Could this be a problem with rendering?
Could we all be using some restricted word as a field label, and giving Reader hiccups every time it tries to follow the file? (I don't see how, since the labels are wrapped in " " and ought to be treated as strings.)
For the record, my tab order falls apart between two checkboxes, which are labeled (in the order I need) "both" and "format." As is (as is broken!) it goes from "both" to "animation," skipping nine places. These are also check boxes, and the skipped items are a mix of both.
I think that's everything. I'm off to copy and paste all this into a "please help me" e-mail to Adobe. Wish me luck, and hope for an update...
Thanks,
Kathy Ryan
