Carl Young’s AcroViews

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.

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?

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?

You’ve been reading about it for several weeks, but now you can get your own hands on Acrobat 8. Download it here, and let us know what you think.

During my Adobe-supervised Acrobat 8 demo at the Phoenix Acrobat User Group meeting, PDF guru Steve Matson of Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station smiled when Acrobat 8 converted a native AutoCAD file to PDF. His smile got even bigger when he found out Acrobat 8 can convert *.dwg files to PDF without AutoCAD. Even the layers come in.
The *.dwg I used in the demo was filled with very fine red and yellow lines. When I mentioned that Acrobat 8 preflight tools now repair files as well as generate reports, he asked me to convert the *.dwg to PDF and to then convert the PDF to grayscale. I had no idea if this would work, but I gave it a shot. The “convert to grayscale” preflight profile worked like a champ. The drawing converted wonderfully, and even preserved the layers. The drawing looked a lot better in grayscale, too.

I hadn’t thought of using preflight tools on what Adobe calls AEC (Architecture, Engineering and Construction) PDF files, but I think there is a lot of potential in the concept.

—Carl

The AcroUser blogsphere has been a little quiet lately because most of us have been focused on prepping for Acrobat 8. Now that it has been announced, I am sure you will be seeing a lot of posts about it.

There’s a lot to say. 8 is a big-time release with a new interface and lots of new features and enhancements, like the capability to enable digital signatures and saving in Reader for limited distribution.

To me, the most interesting thing about Acrobat and Reader 8 are the hooks to Acrobat Connect, formerly Macromedia Breeze. Breeze is online conferencing and meeting software based on Flash.

As far as I know, branding Connect as Acrobat Connect is the first time Adobe has put the Acrobat name on a non-PDF product.

Connect/Breeze is not part of Acrobat/Reader, but Adobe has placed very prominent links to Connect in both Reader and Acrobat.

In addition, it appears that Adobe will change the Breeze pricing model for small Connect meetings. I haven’t seen anything firm, but charges are supposed to be along the lines of a monthly phone bill for an online meeting of a dozen or so.

The version of Connect you see offered in Acrobat and Reader puts Adobe in the business of being an Application Service Provider (ASP) in a big way. You subscribe to the service, and Adobe provides it, just like your local utility provides water and electricity.

If Adobe gets the pricing and feature set right, Connect could out-Skype Skype. If Connect takes off with a push from Reader and Acrobat, it could transform Adobe into something like a utility company and make small group online meetings as routine as phone calls.

Who knows where this could lead? In the 20^th Century AT&T was known as Ma Bell. In the 21^st, everyone may look to Ma Adobe for online meetings.