Copy PDF Form Fields to multiple other PDFs with Adobe Acrobat Pro (Action Wizard & Javascript)

all right so you're trying to copy PDF form fields from one PDF to multiple other PDFs if you just want a quick solution download the file from the description import it into the action wizard of Adobe Acrobat Pro adjust it and run it if you want a little bit more details about how this works and how I came up with it and also how you might be able to adjust it to fit your needs then you can stick around and I'm going to explain to you what this thing really is oh and you're gonna need a Adobe Acrobat Pro for this one so let's say you have a PDF document with form fields so I can go ahead and put a date here type something here type something there and check the check boxes down here this is all nice and fine but what if I wanted to copy these fields over to another document so there's actually a very nice function in Adobe Acrobat Pro under the prepare form tool where you edit all your form fields you can select all of them right click and then duplicate across Pages which will make a duplicate of your form Fields onto other pages in the same document since I don't have any other pages in here and I just want to duplicate this to other documents I'm not going to be able to click it because it's grayed out but we can use this and with the action wizard create a little script that will copy the fields over to other documents that's pretty handy if you want to copy over these fields to hundreds of other documents and you don't have the time to do it by hand go to the link in the description download the file then in Acrobat Pro you're going to go to if you don't already have it on the right here this little checkbox sign you're going to go to tools go all the way to the bottom and then you're going to see action wizard click on that or then click it on the right if you already have it on the right then go to manage actions and you're gonna see a list of all your current actions that you have in acrybird go to import and then select the file that you downloaded from the description it might ask you for permission for some things just click on allow I promise I don't have anything uh malicious in this script once you imported it there's a few things you need to set up you're going to go to edit and right here you can see what the script really does it just takes a file then it inserts a page from the PDF that you want to copy the fields from but you first have to specify these right here you actually have to click on insert pages and then on specify settings where you can choose your template that you want to copy the fields from then it executes a JavaScript which just copies over the fields pretty much to another page and then it deletes the page again because it already copied the form fields right I hear I also have the set tab order property because I want to tap order these in the direction of a row you can ignore this or delete it if you don't want this and then the last thing is to save the files to a local folder I'm just gonna choose my folder here where I want to save these files to I just made a folder called export then you can save close this you don't actually need to open any of the documents to do this you can close all of them down so I'm just going to close my goal or my Target and I'm just going to close my source PDF right here I'm not going to save anything okay so just as a quick recap I have my form template right here which has the form fields and then I also have my targets I have five targets here and if I go into the first one there's no form Fields right now so if I go to prepare form it's gonna ask you to what how you want to create the form fields so I'm just gonna close these again now here's this thing go to tools action Wizard or choose it down here doesn't matter and then you're gonna run the action we've just edited so the copy Fields General now you can go ahead and choose the files you want to paste the fields onto so click on add files right here I'm choosing my five targets click on open now they've all loaded in here uh right here is going to be the save to local folder you can also just pick another one right here but then all I'm gonna do is click on start and what you're gonna see is it's gonna do all the work for me so gonna open each of these targets um paste the fields in from the template and then it's going to save them into this export folder so let's go ahead and click on start and it's going to put a security warning just because it's gonna write to your file system I don't think this actually appears on Mac but this is the first time I'm seeing this because uh I prepared this on the Mac so I'm gonna just go ahead and click on allow and as you can see It's Quickly scrubbing through my targets and pasting them in here exporting them to my export folder so let's just check this all right looks fine copied everything over I can go ahead and type my values I can click check boxes all as intended and let's check the five perfect so this is very useful if you wanna copy over the fields of one PDF to multiple other ones and it doesn't matter how many they are um the script is not super fast but it can do the job so if you have hundreds of these it's gonna maybe take one minute um I didn't do any exact benchmarks but it works and that's all it needs to do just another thing um I only tested this with date text and check box field so if you have another type of field it might not work but just leave a comment on this video and I'm gonna try to maybe fix it and provide you with a version that's also going to include your type or you can try to fix it yourself by using the JavaScript of course it's uh probably a good idea to experiment a little bit with the action wizard if you work with PDFs a lot it might be a good idea to just go into edit of of my little script and then maybe you also wanna I don't know compress the images or export all the images of the PDFs or whatever the action wizard is really good tool and um pretty useful for many things I hope this tutorial was what you were looking for I came across a lot of unuseful things while searching for a solution for this so if you found this useful maybe leave a like or a comment and yeah I hope you have a great day bye bye

Channel: SiLi

Views: 11,615

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Id: bhbU3C7RIpE

Length: 8min 2sec (482 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 24 2022