Today I set up a PDF Form for a local company. Up until now they had been using triplicate carbon copies on a type writer to write up proposals. So, what I did was I scanned the template they had for the Proposals and I imported it into Adobe Professional.
In order to make the form look good, I had to set up form text boxes over the spaces where previously they had typed things in with the typewriter. I consistently had the problem where the lines would not match up. Being a good little Word user I searched around for a paragraph box…to no avail.
About 20 minutes later, I realised there was no easy way to change the line spacing on Forms. After some googling I found a few posts on various forums. Most of them, unfortunately useless. Until eventually someone suggested that I use rich-text formatting to configure the box to accept 9.5 pt spacing. I tried this. It worked for all of one save. Just as quickly as I had changed it, the RTF formatting had disappeared. Anyway, I ended up manually removing the lines from the forms with GIMP, and hard coding the font-size. In the end it looks pretty good. But it’s still frustrating that a piece of software as widely used and as expensive as Acrobat, would miss something so mundane and simple. I’m sure there is a pissed off Slashdot post about it somewhere.
If anyone knows a better way, Comment me.
