273 Set tab order for forms

- [Anne-Marie] You can use Adobe InDesign to create forms, add fields inside your InDesign document, export to PDF, and result in something like this form, that I downloaded from the IRS website. What I want to talk about in this particular video is the concept of tab order. How can you specify tab order in InDesign? Take a look at this form. If I click inside the first field, and I press the Tab key, it goes to the next field, and then it goes to each one of these check boxes in order, and so on.

That's called a tab order. Of course, I could just click here and type, but a lot of people just tab from field to field, which is nice. Now, I have created a form in InDesign, a very simple form, you can see the form fields inside these fancy boxes. And I've exported this to PDF, visit form, right here, and I click inside the first field, and I press the Tab key, uh, what happened? The Submit button is selected. I press Tab again, the Medium t-shirt size, and again, and again, ugh, what did I do wrong? Well, I didn't do anything wrong, other than forgetting a step in InDesign.

By the way, I should mention that you can set tab order in Acrobat, but it's a little bit gnarly, and it's not really the focus of this tip. Instead, we're going to try and do the work in InDesign. Let me jump back to InDesign. The default tab order is the order that you created the form fields in the first place. Isn't that weird? So if I look at this in normal view, I must have created the First Name field, and then the Submit, or maybe I did the email address and then Option, or Alt-dragged it to do a duplicate for the first name.

Whatever crazy order that I did the form fields in, that is the tab order. So it's chronological. Doesn't make that much sense. Now, when I first encountered this problem, I went to the Help file, right, like any normal InDesign user. And in the Help file, under tab order, Forms workflow, Adding a Form Field, Specify tab order. Look at this, it had this really interesting thing of using the Articles panel to specify tab order. The Articles panel is normally used when you're exporting a file to HTML, or to fix layout EPUB, in order to tell InDesign in which order actual content should be exported, not really tabs, but it says here, there are two methods of specifying a tab order.

Use the Articles panel, or choose Object, Interactive, Set Tab Order. So the Articles panel, if I zoom in here, you can see that it's talking about creating an article with each of the fields in order down here. So I went ahead and did that. I went to that trouble here in InDesign. Let me show you in this visit form with Articles panel. I'll go to the Window menu, and choose Articles, and here you can see, I've dragged over some of the field names. First Name, Last Name, Email two.

I might, for example, select the comments field, and drag that over, and just drop it right below there, and so on. And according to the instructions, I turned on Use for Reading Order in Tagged PDF, but that is actually something quite different than tab order, reading order. Still, I went ahead and did that, and then let me export this to PDF interactive again, and we'll call this visit form articles panel. And I'm going to go ahead and export it as a tagged PDF, and click OK.

And now, let me put it in regular view, and click inside the first field, actually, let me fit it in window with Command or Control-zero, and then I'll press the Tab key, and what happened? It got the Submit button again, and then the Medium, and then the classrooms, and so on. It didn't make a speck of difference, and I'm telling you that I was knocking on this feature for a long time, and could never get it to work. I tried making each field its own article, and that did not seem to make any difference whatsoever.

So I have to conclude that somebody was mistaken, or maybe at one point in time, this worked, but as far as I can tell, this does not work, and maybe by the time you watch this tip video, they will have updated and corrected this, but I verified that this doesn't work with a bunch of expert InDesign user colleagues of mine, and they're like, nope, doesn't work, Articles panel doesn't work like that. Instead, if you want to specify tab order in InDesign, there are two ways. Don't bother with the Articles panel.

That would be a cool feature, if it ever happened. One way is, when you export this, I'm going to export it again, and we'll call it version two. In the Adobe PDF interactive dialog box, turn on Use Structure for Tab Order, and that means that start from the top to the bottom, and then left to the right, use that structure for tab order. I'll click OK, and we'll see how this works. Click inside the first field, press Tab, Last Name, Email Address, jumps down to Comments, it skipped this, but at least it understood this part, right? And that would have worked whether or not we did the Articles panel at all, it would work for this one as well, take it from me.

But the one way to definitely specify tab order from InDesign is to use that other option that they talked about in the Help file, which is Object, Interactive, Set tab order. It's not the best dialog box in the world, it's not resizable, so if you have a ton of fields, you're going to be doing a lot of scrolling. Also, if I select a field here, it doesn't automatically select the field in the form, which would be nice. Nor does it show numbers on the form fields, indicating the tab order.

All that would be fantastic, and I hope to see that in a future version of InDesign. But for now, what you're going to have to do is find the first field, which is First Name, and then you can just drag and drop it up. Let's see if I can get it up there. And then up, down here, I'll just do like this, and then I'll put Last Name underneath it, that's good, and then Email we'll put right there, and then we don't want Button six until the bottom, so I'll move it right up here, and then we want Start Year to appear after Comments, and box four got messed up there, okay, that's close enough, except that all the t-shirts come first and then these boxes, but I can Shift-click, get them below, okay, fine, I'll move box four up here.

So, like I said, it's not that much fun to do this. Box four is giving me a pain. Of course, this depends a lot on your intelligent naming of fields. Otherwise, they might be called Field one, Field two, or Box one or Text one or Text two, give them a good name. I'll click OK here, and you do that inside the Buttons and Forms, right here, so that's First Name. You might want to give them good names, so that you can recognize them in that dialog box. Now, I'm going to go ahead and export, and I'll just say, panel resort, with the same settings as before.

And click inside the first field, Tab, Last Name, Tab, next, Comments, Classrooms, T-shirt size, and Submit. So that worked pretty well. If I need to tweak it anymore, I would do so within Acrobat. It's not the best of all possible worlds, but at least hopefully you have learned a few tips to name your fields intelligently, don't bother wrestling with the Articles panel, just use the Object, Interactive, Tab Order dialog box to do all your field tab order setting in InDesign.