Creating a PDF
- Your initial form can be created using a variety of tools, after which you can use Adobe Acrobat DC to make it a fillable PDF form.
- The software you can use to create a PDF include Microsoft Word, Microsoft Publisher, Adobe InDesign, Google Docs, other desktop publisher tools. You may also print a document or form to a PDF.
Tips for Using Adobe Acrobat
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- Edit PDF will let you edit static content (labels, placement, etc).
- Prepare Form will let you create fillable fields that Jadu uses. Adobe will attempted to automatically generate fillable fields, but this doesn't always happen and you may need to update the name of the fillable fields.
- Adobe field types that are not recommended:
- Add Button
- Date Field
- Dropdown
- Listbox
- Useful field properties in Adobe:
- Appearance Tab
- Show/Hide field border by changing the border color
- Change font and font size
- Options Tab
- Change field alignment
- Set field character limit with limit of to prevent run-over text
- Checkbox and Radio Only - Set export value (This needs to be the same as the value in Jadu and is case sensitive.)
- Appearance Tab
- Checkboxes and radio buttons should be created within Adobe instead of another tool because they don't convert well and you may have to redo your work.
- If a PDF has fields that you don't want mapped, after the conversion make sure to delete any fillable fields that Adobe might have created during conversion.
Important Considerations for PDF fields
Follow these Jadu-related tips when creating fields in your PDF.
- Make sure that Adobe fields are named appropriately so that when mapping in Jadu it's easy to tell what you are mapping.
- The export value for checkboxes and radio buttons in Adobe always needs to match the value in Jadu (case sensitive).
- If using a multi-page PDF, make sure to do the mapping for each page.
- If a field repeats on multiple pages of a PDF (example: a student's name), the field names need to be different for each page (example: student_name_1, student_name_2, etc).
- There must be a mapped field on each page of the PDF or it will not load into Jadu.