: Designing a form in InDesign, table or other method I've been tasked with creating a form/report for a client. The client provided a printed example with the fields they require and the start

@Steve758

Stretching your "other method" phrase to the maximum (and probably more!) can I suggest you move away from InDesign for forms altogether.

Some years ago I moved from InDesign to embrace the ugly, yet incredibly effective Adobe Livecycle for form design.

Once you are used to it (some time!) it is way faster than InDesign for this task, and it's ability to output fillable, interactive pdf's is incredible. Even with javascript calculations and more. Plus snippets, pre-built form clocks and more.

One day your client might ask you to make one of those InDesign forms fillable, although that's possible too (via Acrobat and some hair pulling) you'll be better of, in my opinion, embracing a true form design tool from the outset.

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@Nimeshi706

Quite honestly I much prefer just using tabs (with leader characters) and paragraphs for forms. I would never use a table in InDesign, I find it far too restrictive.

I don't know what all those random empty boxes are supposed to indicate, but sometimes it means you need to redesign the form layout to be more logically human readable.

Using just tabs, leaders and paragraphs allows you to utilize things like space before/after, leading, paragraph rules, etc to adjust individual lines of the form as needed. For example the "Required for delivery" below is merely text with a baseline shift.

I also find, in my work, that forms without a lot of boxes tend to garner more replies. The "box" thing is fine on the web, but in print work, they seem to convey too much "governmental" presence which kind of makes the form seem unfriendly to some.



I never, ever "draw lines". I use tab leaders and paragraph rules. No other lines should be necessary. But then, that may just be my preferences. I don't like "boxy" forms.

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@Shanna688

Tables are not ideal if you need to adjust column widths everywhere.

This method could be faster than actually drawing the lines, since you will need text boxes anyway, so why not stroke them:


set up a page grid of 24 columns with 0 gutter
set up each table "cell" as an individual text box with a 0.5pt black stroke (align strokes to center so they don't overlap between the boxes), which is easier to control in this case
with the proper inset spacing and text flow (horizontal and vertical) you could achieve this. Try to arrange the boxes so they fit onto the grid you created, so you don't do too much math to check their total width for each row
additionally you can use a baseline grid to ensure consistent height for your text boxes (eg. 1x, 2x, 3x)

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