I got this request yesterday from one of my co-workers.

A form author has 10 items. Let’s say it’s “Ice Cream flavors”…chocolate, strawberry, vanilla,… He wants the form recipients to rank them from most to least favorite. But, he wants to prevent the user from giving two flavors the same rank.

There can’t be two most favorites… unless you’re talking about your children… or dogs in my case.

I knew that this could be done with some pretty heavy script to check all of the fields and build an array of values, compare them, and a bunch of other stuff that I didn’t exactly feel like writing.

Have you ever wanted to pre-populate a few form fields in a PDF file without using a server tool like the FDF Toolkit; just something quick and dirty? Well – with a clever use of Acrobat JavaScript, the URL property of the doc object you can do just about anything including fill form fields based on a URL’s query string.

I don’t know if you guys are hearing this as well, but I’ve started running into problems where Acrobat forms (AcroForms, not XFA) are being filled out by Mac OS X and sent back to folks with Acrobat and the fields appear blank until you click into them.

UPDATED 10/05/2011 – Now works with Acrobat X, Version 10.1.1 Fixed the error message popping up for each field.

UPDATED 1/28/2011 – The script has been updated to work with Acrobat X. Because the “Document” menu no longer exists, I move the script to load under the “Edit” menu.

UPDATED 3/18/2010 – There’s been some confusion about when to use this tool so I added some code to test if Mac Preview.app was the last application to save the PDF file. If not, the menu item will be greyed out.

UPDATED 3/17/2010 – I added some additional code to not add the menu item if the script is running in the Adobe Reader and to be greyed out if there are no form fields on the document.

UPDATED 2/18/2010 – I fixed the “An internal error occurred” bug. Give it another shot if you’ve had problems.

Well – not exactly. What would be the point really? Ted and Angie have said it all.

Weighing in at 3.5 pounds and
1,224 pages, the publication of the PDF Forms Bible allows me to officially abdicate my responsibility to discus forms in this blog … at least for a little while.

Buy it at Amazon.Com or Wiley.Com.