Any Acrobat users/experts?

[HamptonCaught]

Hi all - I have an Acrobat document that I created a year or so back and which I now have to make amendments to.

The basic artwork is created in Quark 9 and then saved as pdfs.

Form fields are overlaid in Acrobat (10.1.3), including some hidden fields, so that when users roll over certain panels, they get further information.

OK, so I now need to update some of the pages. I've made the amendments in the Quark file and saved the pages as pdfs.

When I go to the Acrobat file to change a page (Tools > Pages > Replace), the new page comes in but then all of the form fields on that page rotate by 270º. I can select the fields, but can't find any way of rotating them back to their original position. The new page is in the correct orientation, but the fields have rotated.

I'm at my wit's end with this and cannot find a way around it. Searches on the web show other people with the same, or very similar, problems, but I can't find a solution anywhere.

Anyone have any ideas?

[Paddy]

I'm assuming that you've got a form in Landscape rather than Portrait orientation? And you're trying to copy and paste the form fields from the original pages to the amended pages?

I haven't come across this myself and can't find a solution that works on a Mac. There was one that I guess works on a PC, since the method of creating the PDF from Word on a PC is different: http://forums.adobe.com/message/2640312 - and different again when using either Quark or InDesign.

A pain in the neck, to be sure.

[Xairbusdriver]

Just got through helping my wife recover a PDF she was working on in Preview when she mentioned she had been told to use Adobe Reader (on some website, I think). Long story short; what an amazing company! Total refusal to allow using the OS built-in printing APIs in favor of a much less capable Adobe-built function.

As for your field vs. document orientation problems, I can only guess. But is it possible to select the text field(s) and rotate them from some menu? Who knows what it might be named, of course, but my guess would be "Arrange->Rotate 90° Left (or Right)"

I also noted in Reader that the Page Setup dialog is not available from its own menus. It is available in the Print dialog (I think) but the choices made there were not saved with the document. At any rate, is it possible to use that OS functionality to re-orient the document while, hopefully, allowing those text fields to stay as they were originally (properly aligned with the rest of the document)?

In my case, we saved the Preview version of the PDF and opened it in Reader. I then had to edit every entry (and just pasted in a character ["*"]), tab to another field, tab back into the edited field, and then delete my edit. That was the only way Reader would allow her entries to remain on-screen or print! The data was actually IN the fields but it would not display (or print) when one tabbed out of the field. Fortunately, there were only ~75 entries! I also suggested she always open any documents from that source in Reader  as well as how to do that with a right (or control) click. I think she will remember this after the extreme frustration caused by not heading the instructions!

[HamptonCaught]

Paddy - sorry, I should have mentioned that the pages were landscape and not portrait. I wasn't trying to copy and paste as such - I was bringing the new pages into Acrobat via the 'Replace pages' command, which replaces the page but keeps all the form fields intact. Intact, but rotated 270º!

Xad - Believe it or not, it doesn't appear to be possible to rotate the form fields and trust me, I've tried everything.

The problem is now sorted, in that I remade all the form fields on any pages that needed changing. It was definitely the long route (incredibly frustrating to have to recreate work that you've already done once), but I had already spent too much time trying to fix the problem and thought it was time to bite the bullet.

The disappointing thing is that having posted on the Adobe forum, I didn't get a single response - and Adobe staff man that site. I'm viewing this as a bug in Acrobat and maybe that's why they opted to ignore it.

And Paddy - you don't know how accurate your 'Pain in the neck' comment is. And not just the neck.

Thanks for the responses.