Disable Tabbing?

[LandmarkFoods]

Hello.  I've created a form for a co-worker to enter new items into our system. He loves it, however his one complaint was that when he hits tab it goes to the next field—but he wants the cursor to goto the next line.  For instance, there may be 25 fields on one line (one field per letter), but the name of the product may only be 10 characters long—so instead of tabbing 10 times to the next line, he wants to press the "tab" button once and have it go to the next line.  

• Is there a way that when you press "tab"...instead of the curser going to the next field, I can manually set it to go to the field I choose (ie: first field of the next line)?
• Please see example below.

[Niall_O_Donovan]

Hi,

One option would be to replace the ten individual fields and replace them with a single field. When you select a field you can go to the Object > Field palette and set it to combed. This will create the look of a standard combed field and space the alphanumeric characters evenly.

This would mean that the user tabs into the field, input the data and then tab to the next one.

In relation to the tab order, LC Designer has a Tab palette. Here the tab order will be set to automatic, by default. This is my preferred setting. However you can also set a custom tabe order, however this can go out of sync when you add new fields.

There is an example here that looks at tabbing order: http://assure.ly/gBUUXB.

The important thing to bear in mind is that the automatic tabbing order is influenced by the x/y coordinates of objects and objects that are grouped in subforms.

Hope that helps,

Niall

[LandmarkFoods]

Hello Niall,

Thank you for responding. Let me back track a little. The form was originally created with Word and saved as a PDF (before we had LiveCycle) and was for print use only. However, due to terrible hand writing some people have (lol) we decided to make it into a form that they can fill out on their PC. SO, it was not a form created in LiveCyle, yet an imported PDF. Due to this I don’t have complete flexability with the form as I would if I had created it from scratch in LiveCycle.

The comb option didn't seem to work how I needed, but you gave me the idea of creating a single field per line and adjust the letter spacing(kearning)—however, that doesn’t work when importing a PDF???

I'm a graphics major, so I don't know any coding—but is there a line of script I can enter in the script editor?

Any other ideas/work arounds or are my hands tied?

Much Thanks,

Desiree

[Niall_O_Donovan]

Hi Desiree,

While you can import an existing PDF into LC Designer, it can limit some of the features.

I'll be honest, unless the form is very complex I will often recreate the form from scratch in LC Designer. Another option is to export the existing form in Acrobat to image files (JPEG) and then use these as a background to the page in LC Designer. Again this really only works for forms that are one or two pages, otherwise the form file increases too much.

The last option would be to stay in Acrobat and not import the form into LC Designer. In Acrobat you can "add  fields" to a form. Acrobat will take a first stab at it by looking at the lines on the form and suggest objects. You can then amend these to suite your requirements.

If you stick with the form at the moment, then you are going to have to sort out the vertical (and horizontal) alignment, so that tabbing will work more reliably.

Hope that helps,

Niall

[LandmarkFoods]

Hello Niall,

I appreciate your feedback. Thanks again

Cheers,

Desiree