Acrobat 8 Professional has a feature that attempts to identify text in your PDF that could be a form field. For example, when it sees “Name: ______________”, it will add an interactive form field on top of the underline and name it “Name”. To use the feature, choose Forms> Run Form Field Recognition. Acrobat will find and convert the fields, and display a Recognition Report that lists all the fields it detected. Each item in the report is hot linked to the actual field so you can easily find it and use the Form editing tools to add actions to it.

If your form design uses fields that are more complicated than a phrase followed by an underline (for example, boxes instead of underlines), you’ll need to create a separate layer in your original document that has simpler form fields in the same locations. (This works in Illustrator and InDesign because they can export a layered PDF file, but not QuarkXPress because it can’t yet export a layered PDF.) You can hide that layer in Acrobat and it will still see and convert them to form fields.

In other applications, you can just create two versions of the document, let Acrobat generate the form fields on the simpler one, then replace the page with a PDF of the complex one. The fields will still work.

To convert a printed form to an interactive form, you can scan it at 1200 dpi, grayscale mode, then in Acrobat, choose Document> OCR Text Recognition> Recognize Text Using OCR. Or, you can scan from within Acrobat by choosing File> Create PDF> From ScannerÉ By default, Acrobat will run OCR on the scan. After that, choose Forms> Run Form Field Recognition.

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