Placing fields on the page

The template studio shows your base PDF on a canvas. You arrange your fields on this visual surface. Write zones decide exactly where output data goes. Read zones decide where incoming data comes from.

You must attach a document source to the template first. The toolbar offers primary types and a More field types menu. You click a field type from the toolbar to start. The app drops the new field at the center of the page. It starts as a Static input with the text SAMPLE VALUE. You edit this value or switch the source to Form field or Extracted.

To drop a field at a specific spot, double-click an empty area on the canvas. On touch screens, you long-press the exact target spot. An Add field pill appears on the screen. You click it to open a drawer and select the field type. The new field lands exactly where you clicked.

You drag a field box to move it across the page. You drag its handles to resize it. A corner drag on an image or a signature keeps its shape. A box stops at the page edge. A plain click selects a field without moving it. Press Esc while you drag to put the box back. On mobile devices, you tap a field to select it before you can drag it.

On a phone, the strip along the bottom is the field surface. Tapping a field on the page raises the strip just enough to show that field. A field with several values also lists its inputs and outputs, and a batch lists its columns, with the one you tapped highlighted. Tap the field or one of its rows to open its details, or the close button to deselect it. Tap Fields to raise the strip into a list of every field: the numbers on the right turn the document to that page, the same numbers inside the list do too, and All shows every field grouped by page. Search looks across every page. Tap a row to open that field's details. Delete field is in the field's ⋯ menu and can be undone from the strip above the sheet.

A zone that came from the document's own form field is fixed. It sits on the box the PDF already has, and the fill writes into that box by name. You select it with a click and set its font in the field card. You cannot drag it, resize it, nudge it, or put it on another page, and that value has no Add write zone or Delete output. To stop filling that box, switch the field off under Detected fields. A group that includes a fixed zone moves without it. Other values of the same field, such as a derived output or a date signed, get their own write zones that you place like any other.

You draw a lasso around multiple fields to move or resize them together. For precise placement, you select a field and nudge it with arrow keys. Holding Shift moves the field 10 pixels at a time. With several fields selected, the arrow keys move all of them. Selecting a placement opens its field in the field list, with the input or output that owns the placement open. Every input and output row has a ⋯ menu: Delete output removes an output with its zones, and Delete input appears while the field has another input. You press the Delete key to remove the focused placement. You press Cmd+Z to undo a mistake and Cmd+Shift+Z to redo it. A run of arrow presses undoes in one step.

A write zone is the rectangle where a value gets stamped on the output. A single field can have several write zones. This lets you stamp the exact same value in multiple spots. Each zone prints only the value it belongs to, so a zone under a derived output stays empty until that output has a value. A zone with no value still becomes an empty, borderless box in the generated PDF, unless it fills a box the source PDF already has, which stays as the source has it. Write zones live in the Outputs section of the field card. They appear as a pass-through row naming the input. The inputs themselves hold no write zones at all.

The text in a zone on the canvas sits where a fill prints it, in the same font, size, color, alignment and underline. One line sits centered in the box. A box at least 24 points tall that holds a line and a half wraps its text from the top, and the line height you set spaces the lines. A box shorter than one line of its text is drawn, and printed, one line tall. Text that does not fit is cut off at the box edge. Generated PDFs use three font families: Helvetica, Times and Courier. The Font list in a zone's Appearance section offers those three. A value with letters outside Western European text prints in an embedded sans-serif face of the same weight and slant. That face covers the Central and Eastern European Latin alphabets (Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Romanian, Turkish, the Baltic languages and more), Greek, and Cyrillic (Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Serbian). A character it cannot draw either, such as Vietnamese, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese or Korean, prints as its unaccented letter, or as ?.

The trash button hides when only one zone remains. Delete output in the row's ⋯ menu removes the entire pass-through row. Clicking a zone row on another page jumps the canvas to that page. The canvas stays still when you use the page picker. You use the page navigator in the toolbar to move within the current document. It accepts a typed page number like 2 / 5. You click Previous page or Next page arrows to navigate. To cross into another document, you click its source tab. You click Save when you finish your changes.

Click Clean up in the editor toolbar to tidy every write zone at once. A zone that sits on a printed line or in a short cell snaps to it: it starts just past the label, sits on the line, and spans the space the form leaves. If the fixed text it prints would not fit, its text size is made smaller. A text size is never made larger. Zones in open space line up with the zones stacked above and below them.

A panel shows what changed. Needs a look lists any zone that still covers printed text, holds a value too long for it, or shares its space with another zone. Click Show to jump to that zone. Click Undo clean up to put everything back.

Clean up only tidies. It leaves a zone alone when you sized it on purpose: a box that covers several lines, a zone that spans more than one cell, a zone in a tall cell, and any signature, image or checkbox zone.

Nothing is saved until you save the template. Clean up does not move read zones, the document's own form fields, the zones of a batch field, or zones in a Word template.

Read zones belong only to your extracted inputs. They tell the AI where to look on the source document. Each zone gets a canvas badge showing the input name.

You open the field card and expand the extracted input inside the Inputs section. You click Add read zone in the Read zones subsection. A rectangle drops at the center of the page. You drag and resize it over the target text region. You must leave the Data tab to add read zones.

Each read zone offers two distinct checkbox options. You select Extract value from selected region to read visual regions directly. This works well for signatures, stamps, and photos. You select OCR (reads whole page) for scanned or image-only pages missing a text layer. You click the Remove read zone button to delete it.

A basic field passes the input directly to a write zone. You click Add output in the Outputs section when you need a derived value. You pick a Kind from the drop-down list. Computed evaluates a custom math or text formula. The AI instruction kind follows a plain-language prompt. The Binding option reads a value from a path. You place the resulting write zone on the canvas.

You ask the Workspace AI chat to draft write zones for a new template. You describe each field name and its data source. You name the printed label it belongs next to. The AI reads the source document and finds the right spot. It places up to 40 fields at one time.

Reply yes in the chat to apply the new placements. If a field lands on the wrong line, you tell the chat. The AI re-places the field to honor your correction. The chat leaves a fixed zone where it is and tells you which fields it did not move. Manual canvas placement always remains available for fine-tuning. The chat assistant creates new write zones only. You must add your read zones by hand.

Some forms shift content between pages on different runs. You click the template name in the toolbar to open template settings over the editor. You turn on the optional Document reflows toggle in Fill, then click Back to template. This setting lets AI reposition fields at fill time to follow moving content.

When you turn this on, each write zone row gains an Anchor hint (optional) box. You type a short description of the surrounding text. The AI uses this hint to find the right spot on the new document.

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