Place and Align Fields on an Awkward Form

Most forms come back from the automatic scan mostly right, and the remaining work is filling them in. Then there is the other kind: the photocopy of a photocopy, the spreadsheet somebody exported to PDF, the council form whose every rule is a table border. On those the scan finds too little, or finds boxes where there are none, and the fastest route is not a fight with the scanner. It is ten minutes of placing the fields yourself.

The detection is rule based, so its failures are predictable rather than mysterious. It reads the form widgets a document declares, infers fields from drawn rectangles and underlines, and matches labels against a fixed vocabulary. Each of those inputs can be missing or misleading.

• A page that is an image. A photographed or flatly scanned page has no drawn lines to measure and no text to read, so there is nothing to infer a field from.
• Tables that look like fields. Many official forms draw every cell border as a separate line, which makes a bare horizontal rule weak evidence. The scan deliberately trusts it less on a page that already declares real fields, and that caution costs a few genuine ruled lines.
• Labels it has no vocabulary for. A field named in a phrasing the label rules do not cover is a blank space beside some text, which is not enough on its own.
• A page at a slight angle. A few degrees of skew turns every rule into a diagonal, and the geometry the scan measures expects horizontals.

1. 1

   Switch to the manual tools

   Manual mode exposes the placement tools rather than the fill flow: text, number, check, cross, signature, erase and highlight.

2. 2

   Pick the tool, then click the page

   The field is created centred on your click, at a sensible starting size, and the editor switches straight back to the select tool. That is why a second click moves your new field instead of spawning another one.

3. 3

   Type into it immediately

   A new text or number field takes focus for typing, so you can answer it before you fuss over its exact position.

4. 4

   Then place it properly

   Drag it roughly where it belongs, drag a corner handle to size it, and finish with the numeric controls below.

The position panel for a selected field gives you its horizontal and vertical position and its width and height as numbers you can edit, four buttons that nudge it one unit at a time, and a control that pulls a stray field back inside the page. If a field is sitting close enough to an edge that it might be trimmed, the panel says so rather than letting you find out after you send the file.

There is one behaviour worth internalising before you start adjusting heights. A typed answer is anchored to the top edge of its box: it sits a few points in from the left, and its baseline falls four points plus the height of the typeface below the top edge. Making the box taller therefore does not move the text down. If an answer is sitting above the printed rule, increase its vertical position rather than its height.

The alignment buttons in the position panel align a field to the page: left edge, centre, right edge. That is useful for a title or a stamp and useless for a column of answers, which is the thing most people actually mean by alignment. Saying so is more honest than implying the buttons do something they do not.

The reliable method is numeric and takes about a minute. Place every field in the column roughly. Select the one that looks best against the printed form and read its horizontal position. Then select each of the others in turn and type that same number in. They line up exactly, because they are now literally at the same coordinate, and the alignment survives export because it is the geometry rather than a guide line on screen.

For a row of fields across a page, the same trick works on the vertical position, and matching widths as well as positions is what makes a grid of boxes stop looking hand made.

Dragging is for the big move and nudging is for the last point or two. A drag has to travel a few points before the editor treats it as a move at all, which is what stops an intended click from shifting a field by accident. Below that threshold the click does the thing a click should do: it toggles a mark, opens the signature pad, or focuses a text field for typing.

Zoom in before nudging. At a page width fit a single unit is smaller than a pixel, so four presses can look like nothing happened, and the temptation is to press twenty more and overshoot.

A rescan is safe to run at any time. It reconciles rather than replaces: fields you placed yourself and fields you have already filled are never removed, and empty detected boxes survive while the scanner still sees the same target. The status line reports what changed, in fields added and obsolete fields removed, rather than leaving you to spot the difference.

That tells you when each is the right move. Rescan when the document changed: you rotated a page upright, merged another file in, or ran text recognition over a scan so there is now text to read. Place by hand when the document is the same and the scan has simply reached the limit of what its rules can justify. Running the scan again on unchanged pages produces the same answer it produced the first time, which is the correct behaviour and a waste of your afternoon.