Designer to Acrobat form conversion hack no longer works
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?
January 12th, 2007 at 1:16 pm
Carl,
To convert a Designer form to an Acro form for the example you cite here, make sure the form is saved from Designer as a static form. Open the form in Acrobat and use Docutment > Extract pages. The extracted page will be converted to an Acro form.
If trying to convert dynamic forms, the only option you have is to use Acrbat 7 as you mentioned. I haven’t found a workaround for this.
ted
January 12th, 2007 at 1:29 pm
Ted,
You are the master. Document | Extract pages does work on a static PDF. Thanks for that, and we will keep searching for a dynamic form answer.
Carl