In January 2017, Acrobat DC added two new buttons to the prepare form panel in Adobe Acrobat DC: Add Image and Add Date:
The Add Image button creates a rectangle that – when clicked in Adobe Acrobat Pro or Reader DC – launches Finder (Mac) or Explorer (Windows) to navigate to an image to be inserted into that field.
To demonstrate this, I have created a business card order form in Adobe InDesign for a Travel Agency.
Note that I have not made the image field in Adobe InDesign. There is a good reason for this: it isn’t possible at the time of writing the article as the option doesn’t exist in the buttons and forms panel in Adobe InDesign.
While this is frustrating, it can be added in Adobe Acrobat. I’ll leave a link to the indesign uservoice feature request to hopefully have this (and the add date button) added in future (ignore that the Adobe Staff says its fixed at the time of writing – I disagree).
For now, I’ll export this file as an interactive PDF and add the add image button to the artwork.
I can then close out of preview and look at the form. This should be fine for testing purposes.
For the purposes of prototyping this form, I’ll type some dummy data and use a stock photo from Adobe Stock.
Fields all look fine, the text can be extracted by either cutting and pasting into my InDesign card template, or using the export option from the Prepare Form tools. While the image isn’t juxtaposed correctly, I can do that once I extract the image from the PDF… or at least I thought.
The image won’t extract
If I go to the Edit PDF tools of Acrobat, the image (and its field) cannot be selected.
The image isn’t shown as an attachment in the attachments tab.
If I use the Export all as images from the Export PDF tab, will that work?
No, it only exports the images of the beer bottles and the Eiffel Tower shown in the original card.
How about if I use the Edit Object tools, right click on the image and select “edit image”? Unfortunately, this is unavailable too.
Using the Enfocus Pitstop Professional Plug-in, can I extract the image this way? No!
Yes, I could zoom in and take a screen capture, or render the PDF in Adobe Photoshop, but neither will retrieve the image to the exact resolution the original image was supplied. Looking at this particular image, if I zoom in at 3200%, it is quite a high resolution image.
At this point, I turned to the internet for help, only to find the following thread on the Adobe Forums that contained a response from an Adobe Staff Member that read as follows:
To me, this is bizarre… the whole purpose of adding an image would be to remove it later for another purpose, especially since the form field doesn’t have any cropping, scaling or rotating options. The whole point of me making this form was so that:
- the client didn’t need the full version of acrobat to add the image as an attachment to the PDF;
- the client Didn’t need to send the PDF and the image separately;
- I could receive one file to prepare the content of the business cards, rather than bits and pieces from various emails or downloads.
However, all is not lost!
There is a way
Create a new InDesign file and place the filled in interactive PDF as an image.
Export the file as a print PDF using the [High Quality Print] setting with the following change to the compression panel:
Now, when the PDF opens in Adobe Acrobat Professional DC, I’m able to use the Print Production Tools to click on the image and then select Edit Image.
Once the image opens into Photoshop, I can see it is the same size as the original.
So yes, it is possible to extract an image from the Image Field of a PDF, but it takes a little work. I’m just frustrated why the Acrobat Team made it difficult “by design”.
Lastly, if anyone from the Acrobat Team is reading this going “he’s having a go at us again”, rest assured, I will be praising the team in an upcoming post.