setting tab order of form fields?

[wilcoxon]

Is there a way to set tab order of form fields other than dragging names in the Fields pane? This is an insanely inefficient way to do it for forms with lots of fields.

If there isn't another way, please consider this a request to add such functionality (I find it critical). Ideal would be simply numerically setting the tab order for a field in the Properties pane (ex I want to move the fields at tab order 156-158 to tab order 14, 10, and 18 respectively). At an absolute minimum, how about allowing right-clicking an item in the list and do "move to top" or "move to bottom"?

[Tracker Supp-Stefan]

Hello wilcoxon,

Having a form with 150+ form field widgets on the same page seems a bit unusual, but I will pass your suggestions for consideration to our devs. Please note that this is not a promise that we will make any changes, but rather that we will consider your suggestion.

And you are correct that for the moment the only way is to drag the items in the Fields pane.

Regards,
Stefan

[wilcoxon]

On the Adobe Acrobat forums, I did find some helpful advice for PDF X-Change (odd place to find it but useful):

And in this PDF Editor any set of fields selected are easily rearranged in the Fields tab - even ones unevenly spread throughout hundreds of form fields. Just drag-select the fields in the form, and then drag one of the selected fields in the Fields panel, and they'll be nicely grouped together.

That's very helpful but still not ideal.

The other possibility I found on the Acrobat forums was to programmatically add an onBlur event to fields to effectively over-ride the tab order (via Field.SetFocus). That seems like overkill for most situations though.

[Tracker Supp-Stefan]

Hello wilcoxon,

Thanks for sharing what you found in those other forums - hope it will be useful to someone else too!
And as for the original enquiry and suggestion - I've not yet heard back from our devs.

Regards,
Stefan

[Oscar19]

Dragging the field names in the Fields list does not work when Options / Alphabetical Order is checked. To enable dragging, set Options to Order by Pages. After dragging and dropping, Options / Tab Order is auto-set to Order Tabs Manually.

As a last resort, you can move some fields' tab order by editing them out and back in:
- Select the fields to be moved to later in the tab order.
- Edit / Cut.
- Edit / Paste.
Now any non-edited fields come first in the tab order, and the cut+pasted fields come last.

[Will - Tracker Supp]

Thanks for that Oscar!