Adobe LiveCycle (Archived)

Abhinav_Sharma · 12/17/10

Hi,

I am new to LC Designer. I am developing an multipage PDF form. It's having both static & dynamic fields (conditional). Count of fields is around 100. I was going through the TAB Order, and I found there are two types of TAB ORDERING available i.e. Automatic & Custom. I don't know what to opt from these available options.

My Ques: Which TAB ORDER should be used @ which time?

pls answer.

Thanks.

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Abhinav

Niall_O_Donovan · 12/17/10

Hi Abhinav,

My personal preference is for automatic tab order. I find that when you go for a custom tab order, it can go out of sync as more objects are added to the form. The custom order can be re-established, but it can be tedious.

In automatic mode the tabbing order is very much affected by the relative x/y coordinates of objects working from the top left of the form. If an object on the right is even a fraction higher than an object on the left, then it will get focus first. This highlights the benefit of using the snap to grid feature in LC Designer. The other thing to remember is that once the tab goes into a subform, it will work its way through all the objects in the subform before coming out to resume with the rest of the form. This can be handy to control the tabbing order.

There is an example here looking at some of the issues:

http://www.assuredynamics.com/index.php/category/portfolio/tabbing-order/

Hope that helps,

Niall

Assure Dynamics

View solution in original post

Niall_O_Donovan · 12/17/10

Hi Abhinav,

My personal preference is for automatic tab order. I find that when you go for a custom tab order, it can go out of sync as more objects are added to the form. The custom order can be re-established, but it can be tedious.

In automatic mode the tabbing order is very much affected by the relative x/y coordinates of objects working from the top left of the form. If an object on the right is even a fraction higher than an object on the left, then it will get focus first. This highlights the benefit of using the snap to grid feature in LC Designer. The other thing to remember is that once the tab goes into a subform, it will work its way through all the objects in the subform before coming out to resume with the rest of the form. This can be handy to control the tabbing order.

There is an example here looking at some of the issues:

http://www.assuredynamics.com/index.php/category/portfolio/tabbing-order/

Hope that helps,

Niall

Assure Dynamics

Abhinav_Sharma · 12/17/10

Hi Niall, Thanks for such a great info, it was really helpful !!

I had tried with the Custom ordering and there were many strange issues coming frequently. Sometimes when tabbing through fields it by-passes some fields and cursor jumping to last page. I was totally stucked with that.

But I still don't know where to use the Custom Tab Ordering. It would be great if you can provide guidance for it.

Thanks.

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Abhinav

Niall_O_Donovan · 12/17/10

Hi Abhinav,

The Help file gives one example where you have two columns of fields and want the user to complete the objects on the left first, before tabbing moves over to the fields on the right: http://help.adobe.com/en_US/livecycle/9.0/designerHelp/index.htm?content=000107.html

You could achieve the same effect by wrapping the objects on the left in a subform.

I'll be honest, I very rarely use custom tab order, as it can be flakey (imho). I would recommend using auto and keeping objects aligned (x/y coordinates) and using subforms to control the tab order.

Good luck,

Niall

Assure Dynamics

brainstewn · 9/13/13

Automatic Tab ordering using LC ES3 is not giving me the results I want in an inherited LC document. When defer to custom and move them around I get some really weird results. See screenshot.