In Infigo Designer, you can create variable text fields in one of two ways. You can either create a text field on the fly using our text field tool, or you can convert pre-existing live text in the PDF to a text field. 

Creating a new text field

To create a text field, you will need to open your template in an instance of Adobe Acrobat which has Infigo Designer installed. Once you have done this, open the Tools section, and then expand the Plug-In Infigo Designer tab.

In the expanded menu, you will need to select the top-left tool . If you hover over this tool, you will see that it is annotated "Add text field to PDF". Clicking on this tool will change your cursor from what it was previously to a crosshair, which will then allow you to drag and draw a text field. As soon as you let go of the mouse, the text field will be created with the dimensions and positioning you have just drawn.

Once the field has been created, its Field Settings menu will automatically open, as seen in the screenshot below.

You will be able to change your field settings as per usual here, however you will not be able to see a true preview of the text until you have saved the field by clicking OK. Please note that you will not be able to save the text field without providing it with a name. These names must be unique from all other fields, and must only contain alphanumeric characters.

We recommend using an efficient naming scheme for your text fields so that each field is named appropriately. For example, if you were creating a text field for the address on the first page, you could call it Address. If there was also an address on the second page, you could call it Page One Address. 

A good naming scheme will allow you to more easily navigate and modify your text fields.

Converting live text

In order to convert live text to a text field, you will need to open your template in an instance of Adobe Acrobat which has Infigo Designer installed. Once you have done this, open the Tools section, and then expand the Plug-In Infigo Designer tab. Please note that in order to use this feature, the PDF must contain live text.

Once you have opened the tools, you will need to highlight the text you wish to convert, then click on the bottom-right tool . If you hover over this, it will have the annotation "Convert the selected text into a Text Field". 

Clicking this will cause the plug-in to try and convert the text to a text field. It will also try to pick up the leading, character spacing, font, colour, positioning etc. of the text, and save all of that in the newly created text field's Field Settings. If it cannot pick up the leading, the font is not present on the user's system, or if there is another issue preventing it from perfectly converting the text then you will be informed in a popup. If any of these issues are encountered, the plug-in will continue regardless and assign the default settings instead, which you can then change at a later date.

Once the plug-in has converted the field, it will automatically open the fields' Field Settings as seen in the screenshot below.

As you can see in the screenshot, the field has picked up the text and the text settings, and has named the new field Converted Field. We recommend changing the name of this field before saving it to meet with the same naming recommendations provided earlier in this document, as well as ensure that there are no naming conflicts with fields converted later on.