Adobe LiveCycle Designer 8 Improvements
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?
