Carl Young’s AcroViews

For those of you producing PDFs, Adobe’s announcement today that they are turning over PDF to ISO should be very good news. No longer will Adobe be the one deciding what goes into the PDF specification, but a standards body will. The situation with PDF will be like other standards, such as TIFF and JPEG. Right now Adobe owns PDF but publishes the specification for all to use.

The bad news is ISO moves more slowly than Adobe, so we are likely to see changes in the spec running behind Acrobat development.

Note: Adobe is not turning Acrobat and Reader over to ISO, just the PDF file format. Adobe will sit on the ISO committee and ask that it begin by accepting the current 1.7 specification, but after that it is up to the ISO committee to define PDF and its subsets, such as PDF/A.

The blog entries cited below have links to all the official documents.

http://www.acrobatusers.com/blogs/leonardr/
http://blogs.adobe.com/shebanation/2007/01/a_new_door_opens_for_pdf.html
http://blogs.adobe.com/loridefurio/2007/01/pdf_spec_releas.html
http://www.acrobatusers.com/blogs/leonardr/history-of-pdf-openness/

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Carl Young
www.pdfconference.com
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What Adobe is now calling the PDF Editor is a nice way to quickly create a simple PDF by typing on the screen. (For more, see this article by Kurt Foss.) The command is available from File > Create PDF > From Blank Page. You don’t see the From Blank Page option from the Create PDF button on the toolbar.

What isn’t so obvious is how to ease the process of dressing up your file. By default, the text you type will be Arial. You can change it from the PDF Editor, but you don’t have to start off with Arial as the default. Instead, you can dig into your Preferences setting and change the font to something else.

Choose Edit > Preferences and select New Document. You can now change the default font to something more interesting, and amaze your coworkers with your Acrobat prowess.

I’ve spent most of the past year working on forms in LiveCycle Designer. This week I needed to create a form in Acrobat. I whipped up a background with InDesign, exported a PDF, ran form field recognition in Acrobat 8 and was pretty close to being finished. I like LiveCycle Designer’s premade pull-down list of countries and U.S. states, so I created a blank form in Designer 8 and added the country and state pull-downs.

In Acrobat 7, you could convert (sort of) a Designer form to Acrobat by using the Create PDF > From Web Page feature. You select the Designer PDF form instead of a web page, and Acrobat’s web page conversion tool would turn the XML inside the Designer form to a regular PDF.
To my surprise, this tried-and-true hack didn’t work on this very simple form. Instead, Acrobat 8 created a new PDF and buried the Designer form inside as an attachment.

When I ran the Designer form through Acrobat 7, the form converted as expected, and I was able to copy the state and country list from the converted document into my new form.

I’ve done a bit of testing, and cannot get Acrobat 8 to convert a Designer-created form into an old-school AcroForm. However, Acrobat 7 still works as expected.

Has anyone got the hack to work in Acrobat 8?