Carl Young’s AcroViews

ComboBoxes are one of the most useful features of electronic forms. Often called pull-down lists, ComboBoxes present the user with a list of choices. ComboBoxes are probably the most popular form field type after text boxes.

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One annoying aspect of Acrobat’s ComboBox is its one-at-a-time entry restriction. You can’t import a list of 50 items from an Excel column, for example. You have to copy and paste each cell from Excel into Acrobat.

However, you can use the Draw module of OpenOffice to create PDF ComboBoxes. A great feature of OpenOffice Draw is that you can copy and paste the contents of a entire column of Excel data into its ComboBox object. I’ve done 100 or so objects at a time. This technique is a great time saver if you have a form with many ComboBoxes. See my demo for an example of how this process works.
Wouldn’t it be nice if Acrobat, or Illustrator, or InDesign, supported this kind of import into ComboBoxes? If so, speak up and respond to this blog post.

This question came up on a private list. How do I set an Acrobat text field to start in the middle, top or bottom of the field? Note that is applies to forms created in Acrobat Professional. This feature has been available since version 6.

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It’s not difficult to set text alignment, but isn’t obvious how.1) Create a text field with the AcroForms tools. Enable RTF in the Options tab.

2) Go into Preview/Hand tool mode.

3) Enter some text and select it.

4) Bring up the Properties Toolbar.

5) Click on More.

6) Click on Paragraph. You have basic para formatting options now, including top, bottom and middle alignment.

Adobe has quietly made the upgrade to LiveCycle Designer ES available at the Adobe store. It’s been available as a free trial, but mine is about to expire. Looks like it will cost around $45 US, including shipping.

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‘ In case you are wondering, the LiveCycle suite and Acrobat are on different release cycles. We get a new version of Designer with a new version of Acrobat, but an even newer version of Designer gets released with an update of the LiveCycle suite. Although called ES, the version number on my trial is 8.1, the same as the latest version of Acrobat.

Adobe President and COO Shantanu Narayen points out that Acrobat is seeing most of its growth coming from new users, not upgrades. If you are one of those, welcome to the Acrobat User Community.

PDF can be a simple representation of the printed page, or it can be a very dynamic, changing form. Creating forms is one of the most challenging tasks in the PDF world. If you are new to forms (and I see quite a few postings to the forums that suggest that), then I have some suggestions for you.

Before you draw your first form field, take a look at the articles on form design here at AUC.

For example:

Getting Started with Acrobat Forms

Adobe LiveCycle Designer or Acrobat Forms?

Nuts and Bolts of PDF Forms

Extended Form Features

Barcoded Forms in Adobe Acrobat

Digital Signatures and Adobe PDF

FormRouter’s Reader Extensions service: Extra features for fair price

If you are using the free LiveCycle Designer that ships with Acrobat Pro to create forms, I suggest you post technical questions to the Livecycle Designer forum. We do our best to answer questions here, but Adobe engineers answer questions over there.
We all started out as new PDF form designers, so don’t be afraid to speak up and ask a question. But because many of us have been there before, you will find many of your questions already answered in the articles.

Ted Padova recently pointed out that we are receiving quite a few questions on Ask an Expert about Acrobat 8 support for Microsoft Vista and Office 2007. Here is what we know from Adobe.

If I read the statement and do my math correctly, that means we should see an update from Adobe by the end of summer. I am sure you will hear more directly from Adobe and via the auto update feature in Acrobat.

I’ve just completed my first production form using OpenOffice. (Warning this is a training registration form, so it is promoting my business). You can see it here.

My experience:

1) It worked pretty well, overall.

2) I used OpenOffice 2.1, and there is an update to 2.2. 2.2 seems to be better for outputting forms.

3) Using 2.1, I struggled with creating combo boxes for pull-down lists. I gave up and created them in Acrobat. Apparently a setting I used earlier was trying to link the pull-downs to a data source. That doesn’t transfer over to PDF.
4) A Mac user reported that the fonts were corrupted.

5) I saw some corrupted fonts in Windows. If I did a File > Save As… this problem went away.

Give OpenOffice a try and let me know what you think.

What if I were to tell you that there is a free, cross-platform PDF form design tool? One that has the capability of designing a form, inserting form fields and exporting it as a PDF?

It’s called OpenOffice, the opensource Microsoft Office replacement from the OpenOffice organization.

The Draw component includes tools for creating XForms. And like each OpenOffice component, it has a built-in PDF export function. Create an XForm in Draw with components that are supported in Acrobat, hit the export as PDF button and you have a PDF form.

The form workflow is like this: Design and insert fields in OpenOffice Draw, export as a PDF, test and then revise in Draw. Unfortunately, you cannot add JavaScript (at least as far as I can tell) in Draw. If your form needs scripting, you will have to add it in Acrobat.

So far I like what I see in OpenOffice.

So will someone explain to me why I can’t add form fields in an Adobe product, like InDesign, and export those fields to Acrobat? I don’t know of a single Adobe product that can do what OpenOffice does. InDesign, FrameMaker, Photoshop, Illustrator and other Adobe applications export PDFs, but you can’t insert form fields without resorting to some PDF hacks.

Yes, I know Adobe LiveCycle Designer ouputs forms, but only in XFA format, which isn’t editable in Acrobat.

Thomas Phinney, Product Manager, Fonts & Global Typography for Adobe, will speak on font embedding and PDF/Acrobat at 1 p.m. April 10. This is technically a Phoenix Chapter event, but I would like to invite all members to participate. AUC is changing things to allow more use of connect, so stay tuned for more details.

If you are moving from the older AcroForm technology to the new XFA format used by Adobe LiveCycle Designer, you probably have been frustrated by Designer’s conversion utility. Most PDF form to XFA form conversions performed by Designer have been pretty ugly.

LiveCycle Designer 8 does a far better job of importing AcroForms and converting those to Dynamic forms. I would rate it 80 percent effective, much better than the 20 percent rating I would give previous versions.That

That said, there is still room for improvement:

1) Designer cannot embed Type 1 fonts, even though Distiller will embed those fonts without a problem. The reason has to do with the lack of explicit font embedding permissions in older Type 1 fonts. I guess Distiller is less strict than Designer.

2) Designer lacks the typographic controls users expect in Adobe products. Your only type control is to make the type bigger or smaller. There is no tracking, spread, distort, kerning and so on.

3) No dot leaders. Dot leaders in existing forms are converted to dotted lines. Yucko.

4) Designer still lacks the graphics import capability you would expect in an Adobe product. You can’t bring in an AI, PSD, DWG or files. You can bring in EPS, but I would like to be able to bring in logos and other objects in stand alone forms that won’t be served up by LiveCycle server products.

There’s more. What do you think?

The first product I ever used to create a PDF was FrameMaker. I remember creating PostScript print files and running them through an early version of Acrobat Distiller, and thinking that this PDF thing was a lot better than Display Postscript.

I’ve been using FrameMaker for almost 15 years, and for most of that time I have constantly heard rumors that the product was going to die.

Well, FrameMaker certainly has been in hibernation. The last major release was in 2002 when version 7 was released. Since then we only have seen dot releases with the latest being 7.2 in 2005. For a history of Frame, see this Wikipedia entry.

Most Adobe products are on an 18-month release cycle. With a five-year pause between major FrameMaker releases we Framers were feeling left out.

Well, take heart, FrameMaker users. Adobe has posted a FrameMaker FAQ that announces a “major new version” in in the first half of 2007. Let’s hope it is an 8 release, not just another dot release with some minor enhancements.

One interesting point in the FAQ is this hint that the next release will include “increased integration of rich media, such as 3D content and animation.” Isn’t that corporate speak for Acrobat 3D and Flash?

Something that amazes me is that Adobe Labs has some FrameMaker application packs for Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) and S1000D. They even are asking for feedback!

After years of obscurity for FrameMaker it is nice to see Adobe getting serious about moving the product forward.