If you find yourself exporting fillable-forms from InDesign to PDF often, you no doubt have felt the frustration of all your work being dumbed-down or flat-out not looking right when you open the file in Acrobat. It’s really frustrating. But don’t sweat it, there is a solution.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, then you can safely ignore this post. If you DO feel the pain, it’s probably because you create a LOT of forms. If that’s true, then you need to check out Form Magic, by IDExtras. This nifty plugin for Adobe InDesign makes the forms you create in Adobe InDesign actually appear the same way in Acrobat after you export to Interactive PDF (see sample image).

As I said, you have to create a lot of forms for this plugin to be useful—because while there is a free version of the plugin, it’s limited to 10 form fields on a single page. The full version with no limits is a $14.95 per month subscription. While that’s an outrageous price for users who only create one or two forms per month, it’s a bargain for those who create multi-page forms multiple times per day.