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When you publish a form, you assign it Published status, which means no changes can be made to the final design. ABBYY FormDesigner automatically checks the form for machine-readability and gives it a unique form identifier. To publish a form, use the Publish Form command (File → Publish Form). Published forms are read-only. All the form identifier elements are assigned a unique numerical value (the same for all the form identifiers of a given form), and the form’s status changes from Draft to Published.

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Publish a form with warnings

When you publish a form, it is checked for machine-readability. If the program detects that the form is not machine-readable, the Publish Form with Warnings dialog box opens. Use it to make the form machine-readable, or to publish the form despite the warnings.
Using a form that is not machine-readable may result in poor recognition quality.
The Publish Form with Warnings dialog box shows a report of all failures to comply with the machine-readability requirements.

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Edit a published form

To change a Published form, select Save Editable Copy As… on the File menu. ABBYY FormDesigner prompts you to save the form under a different name before you can change its design. The status of the renamed form changes from Published to Draft, and the values of the form identifiers are set to 0. Publish your forms after you have completed their design. This helps you track any changes to the finished forms and avoid printing forms that look similar but are in fact different.