Carl Young’s AcroViews

ComboBoxes are one of the most useful features of electronic forms. Often called pull-down lists, ComboBoxes present the user with a list of choices. ComboBoxes are probably the most popular form field type after text boxes.

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One annoying aspect of Acrobat’s ComboBox is its one-at-a-time entry restriction. You can’t import a list of 50 items from an Excel column, for example. You have to copy and paste each cell from Excel into Acrobat.

However, you can use the Draw module of OpenOffice to create PDF ComboBoxes. A great feature of OpenOffice Draw is that you can copy and paste the contents of a entire column of Excel data into its ComboBox object. I’ve done 100 or so objects at a time. This technique is a great time saver if you have a form with many ComboBoxes. See my demo for an example of how this process works.
Wouldn’t it be nice if Acrobat, or Illustrator, or InDesign, supported this kind of import into ComboBoxes? If so, speak up and respond to this blog post.

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.

While the response to my earlier post on hidden layers has been the sound of one hand clapping, I’d like to say a bit more.

To recap, the PDFMaker in Microsoft Office creates a hidden layer when the option for “make accessible” is turned on. This is not a big deal for most people, but for those who must meet certain standards (like PDF/A), it creates a problem.

There’s a new way to find these hidden layers. In Acrobat 8 Pro, choose Adviced > Preflight. Pick any profiel and click Edit. Click on the Plus sign and then put your cursor on the Custom check option. An amazingly sophisticated list of things the preflighter can analyze shows up. Scroll down or Search until you see Layers Used, and then create a custom profile that checks for layers.

Analyze a PDF created with the accessibility options on and you will discover that PDFMaker does, indeed create a layer that does not show up in the Layers Navigation Pane.

Interestingly, the Microsoft Word 2007 Beta pdf converter adds tags for accessibility, but not a hidden layer.

Here’s an issue I have completely missed. If you enable accessibility and reflow in PDFMaker for Acrobat 7 and 8, you create a hidden layer.

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While accessibility is great, creating hidden layers is not. Many large organizations have standards (including PDF/A) that forbid layers, even hidden and seemingly benign ones ones like accessibility.

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I’ve been able to create hidden layers in the PDFMaker for Acrobat 7 and 8 running inside Microsoft Word 2003. All you have to do is enable accessibility in PDFMaker.

Because the layer is hidden, it doesn’t show up in the Layers Navigation Panel. Your only clue is you have an active option to “flatten layers.” Once you tell Acrobat to flatten the layer, the PDF/A Preflight Profile and our own PDF Validator no longer report a hidden layer.

(click to enlarge image)

Interestingly, in my tests the Full Accessibility Check in Acrobat 8 Pro returns the same results for the files with the hidden layer and after the file is flattened.

Let’s hope Adobe comes up a solution that doesn’t require us to choose between accessibility and meeting standards.

The master of Acrobat and FrameMaker annoyances is Shlomo Perets of Microtype. As he points out, the automatic link finder in Adobe Reader and Acrobat 6 and 7 can fail if the web address is split across lines, or if the address includes underscores or dots. Autorecognition of e-mail addresses can fail for the same reasons.

The solution? Always create links with your authoring program so you don’t rely on Acrobat or Reader to find them.

Shlomo has a great publication on PDF Best Practices. Also check out the section at his web site that could be called “Botched Practices” for things not to do with Acrobat.

Look, I am a big fan of Acrobat, so please don’t take the following as Adobe or Acrobat bashing. But as an everyday user, there are some things I wish Acrobat did differently. Also, let me point out that unlike the people who wrote Word Annoyances I don’t have enough complaints to make up an entire book!

Number 1 on my list of Acrobat Annoyances is the absence of a preference for Save or File | Open options like Microsoft has for Word for Windows.

Why? Because Acrobat always defaults to My Documents for saving or opening. Personally, I hardly ever want to save a PDF in My Documents. Like most professionals, I want to save (or retrieve) PDFs from a network drive that gets backed up regularly.

Let me give you an example. This morning I opened a PDF buried deep inside a network drive. I extracted some pages and clicked on the Acrobat Save icon. Did Acrobat offer to save the file in the folder I had painstakingly navigated to?

Heck, no. Acrobat presented the Save dialog box inside of My Documents. I had to painfully retrace my steps on the network drive to save the extracted pages in the same folder as the source document. (My work around is to create shortcuts to frequently-used folders in My Documents exclusively for use in Acrobat.)

When I have complained about this behavior in the past, the response from Adobe is that Acrobat relies on the operating system for default opening and saving locations, which is my case is WindowsXP.

Let me say in reply that Microsoft recognizes this is a problem because it gives Word users a preferences setting. Please see the screen shot of the Preferences settings in Word 2007 below for an example. I also manage some software projects and know that adding this functionality is not a huge deal.

Am I just easily annoyed, or does always having to navigate out of My Documents bug anyone else?

See larger image.