Adobe Acrobat Selected Form Field Color

In Adobe Acrobat there are two coloring options in the fields:

• The background of the field.(default is blue-grey)

• The color of the field while the user is entering information. (default is transparent)

This post covers the second option. If you're interested in eliminating the blue-gray background in all fields, visit this post.

Here's the PDF with form fields added.

When I select the first field, the grey coloring disappears.

1) To change the color while editing, go to Edit >

Add or Edit Fields

2) In this example I'm going to change the color for the "Name" field.

Right click on your field and select "Properties..."

3) Click on the "Appearance Tab"

Then click on "Fill Color"

I chose orange.

4) Back in the document close the form editing by clicking on the icon in the top-right corner.

Now when my cursor is in the "Name" field, it turns orange. When I tab out, or the field is no longer active, it will go back to the grey.

Adobe Acrobat Form Field Highlight Color

I recently made a form in Acrobat, but didn't want the fields to be highlighted with the blue-gray color that is the default. It took me some time to find the option that I wanted.

In Acrobat you are able to control two coloring options in the fields:

• The background of the field. (default is blue-grey)

• The field while the user is entering information. (default is transparent)

This post covers how to change the first option - to change it from the blue-grey. If you're looking for information on field color when it's active (onfocus) then check out this post.

Here's my PDF after adding the fields in Acrobat Pro:

1) To eliminate these boxes go to Acrobat > Preferences

2) Along the left-hand side go to "Forms"

You will see two colored boxes on the right. These control the color of the fields. I have them circled in the image. You may also want to uncheck the box that says "Show border hover color for fields"

Now my PDF looks like this:

*Please not that this changes how the forms look on your computer only. If you change the color on your machine, it will still look blue-grey on another machine with the default settings. In the same way, you may leave the color set to default, but on another person's machine, they may have their color set to magenta. The fields will show up as bright pink on that computer.

Undo Firefox Update

I recently updated Firefox to 4.0 and much to my dismay, I couldn't use the browser after the update. I received a little pop-up warning telling me that I can't use this application with my current OS. I'm on a Mac running Tiger. The new update doesn't work a machine that's this old.

To revert Firefox to it's original state, I just needed to find a previous version of Firefox and install it. Firefox's website provides a nice little walk-through to find previous versions of Firefox. ANY version of Firefox, and in any language, for any platform.

Once you read the instructions, visit their FTP site to download the version that you want.

ftp://ftp.mozilla.org

Ignore Text Wrap InDesign

The Text Wrap feature is great for flowing text around an object. This is applied to the image, and all text that encounters the object will be forced to wrap. However if you want some text to overlay the image, or come within close proximity, it must be allowed to break that Text Wrap Frame.

Here's how:

1) Create your text box and object and set your object to "Text Wrap". In this example I have it to wrap around the bounding box and to have a .125" offset the entire way around the object.

2) Select the text box that you want to ignore the Text Wrap. (In my example I want the words "Duis Autem" to appear overtop of the image.) Right click on the text and select "Text Frame Options"

3) In the pop-up window, click on "Ignore Text Wrap", then click "OK"

4) Now the text ignores the wrap.

InDesign Printing Pages Out of Order

I recently found one more small useful tool for printing in InDesign. It's not a major feature, and I don't think it is used that often. However, someday you may want to print your pages in a non-sequential order. It's very easy to do.

1) Make sure you have an InDesign document with multiple pages. Next, pull up the "Print" dialogue box from the File menu.


2) Click on the "Range" button. You can type in the pages you want to print. The order you key them in as, will be the order that they print. Notice that I will print page 3,1, pages 4 through 6, then page 2. You can include ranges (4-6) or individual pages (5,2,8) in your range field.