Need help with creating/editing Interactive PDF

Question

Beforehand I apologize for my not-so accurate description and weak English.

So I have designed an agreement (or contract) form with several pages in Adobe Illustrator, and I want to have the last page to be an interactive PDF. Which I have been trying to do so in adobe InDesign.

As for the layout I don't have any issues because I simply just copy the AI artboard with all the elements and paste it into InDesign but because I'm a very beginner user in InDesign I have a few issues which I need help with:

1. I need to provide a dual answer field like a YES / NO field, somehow to act when "NO" is selected some other fields and buttons hide automatically and when "YES" is selected it show more fields and buttons.
2. The filling field's text style (font name, color, …) cannot be changed. Only size is adjustable and that is very limited. Is there a way to customize this?
3. I would like to have a button at the end to act as "register" or "send", to email me the result of the filled/answered form. Unfortunately the command mailto:[email protected] only works as a hyperlink to compose an email (I can even define the email subject), but I want the information provided by the other side in the last page (filled/answered fields) to be sent to my email as a final version to rely on (hopefully with date of signed/filled).
4. Also do I have to copy all the other pages of my form into InDesign in order to have one whole interactive PDF (but actually only the last page is interactive)? Or is there a way to combine the single interactive page with a normal PDF created by Illustrator?

Answer 1

If you save the Illustrator file out as a PDF, you can work in Acrobat with the Prepare Form tools to do a lot of what you are trying to do.

As far as submitting the form, you can add a "Submit" button to the PDF, but it has to link to a web based CGI script to receive it.

Adobe has a good tutorial here: Add Submit Button

However, for future use, that link might not stay active, as Adobe changes their methods so often.

Otherwise, you can submit the completed form over email, but that requires the person filling it out to have a computer based email like Outlook set up on the computer to send it.

Answer 2

JavaScript Programming - Adobe PDF (Form)

1. In Adobe Acrobat Pro DC, select "Tools" > "Prepare Form" > right-click selected [dropdown] element > click "Properties" > select "Actions" > select Trigger [Mouse Up] > select "Action" [Run a JavaScript] :

If dropdown.value is selected, send Form as email Attachment :

if ( this.getField("dropdown1").value == "SelectedValue" )

var EmailAddress = "AccountName@Domain"; var ccEmail =" "; var EmailSubject = "Subject"; var EmailMessage = "Message";

var EmailURL= "mailto:"+EmailAddress+"?cc="+ccEmail+"&subject="+EmailSubject+"&body="+EmailMessage;

this.submitForm( {cURL: encodeURI(EmailURL), cSubmitAs:"XML", cCharSet:"utf-8"} );