Carl Young’s AcroViews

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?