Retention of fillable form areas when editing and saving an existing PDF.
Illustrator used to retain fillable form areas when editing and saving an existing PDF. Pretty please. We need that feature back. It's wasting a lot of production time recreating the form fields. When you open and edit graphics in an existing PDF in Illustrator, the instant you save the file (not "Save As...", just "Save") all of the fillable fields are erased.
Since it's all Adobe, why can't they work seamlessly like they used to?
Dennis Bland
shared this idea
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Version 30.1 appears to be the last one that allowed the form fields to stay.
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I was way off. It looks like it was the 2023 Ai update that suddenly began removing the form fields.
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It may have been the 2016 update that removed this capability. I will confirm and get back to you.
Thank you SO MUCH!
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2013 was the very first CC version, 17, right after CS6... there were some changes introduced then how Ai handles PDFs... will try to learn more. Thanks!
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This is a video of what's happening.
I believe the 2013 Illustrator update was when this feature went away.
The form fields used to stay active and filled in when simply editing and saving a pdf in Illustrator. If one did a "save as..." the fields would disappear, which was to be expected, but the way it works now is causing a lot of problems. -
Illustrator is not a general PDF editor and can’t handle everything a PDF can store.
Ai always 'imports' PDFs rather than 'opens' them (if one was saved in any other app, because otherwise Ai just reads back the hidden full copy in its native format).
But then you say it was able to at least leave them unchanged... do you remember what version of Ai got this broken? Can you share a simple test file that fails like this for you?
