I was recently asked to assist with the creation of a large amount of forms that were intended for a print output. The forms themselves were a “boxy” format that also had comb-style fields to indicate how many letters each area of the form should be.

The challenge with this particular brief was how to prepare the forms not only before the deadline, but so that they were also uniform in appearance. The solution was to create a paragraph style that had four GREP styles that would assign parts of the form, namely:

• The start or end of the form
• A letter space
• A small comb
• A large comb

Each part of the form is a monospaced font such as Courier New that has no fill or stroke, but has an underline and strikethrough that go to making the appearance. Take the following example that shows the style that represents the letter space:

The character styles that represent the start/stop lines or the small/large comb fields are effectively the same, but the horizontal scale is reduced to 3% and the underline and strikethrough options are changed to show different amounts of white (or none at all).

To make the form appear, characters that would not generally be used within the form are used to activate the GREP styles. For example, the pipe symbol will not be used in the form details, so this can be used for a start/end of form. Here is a list of the GREP substitutions made in this example:

• | = start/end of box
• ^ = white space
• ` = small comb
• © = large comb.

The following illustration shows the GREP styles in use, how a form would appear, and then how the text appears in the story editor.

There are several advantages of using this method to quickly make comb style forms, such as consistent sizing in forms, or easy to copy and paste portions of a form within a document.

However, there is a significant down-side to this method of form construction, namely that it is for print purposes only. While the forms can be created quickly for a print publication, the form fields do not translate that well to interactive forms via Adobe Acrobat using Acrobat’s Identify Form Fields feature.