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.

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.

I’ve just completed my first production form using OpenOffice. (Warning this is a training registration form, so it is promoting my business). You can see it here.

My experience:

1) It worked pretty well, overall.

2) I used OpenOffice 2.1, and there is an update to 2.2. 2.2 seems to be better for outputting forms.

3) Using 2.1, I struggled with creating combo boxes for pull-down lists. I gave up and created them in Acrobat. Apparently a setting I used earlier was trying to link the pull-downs to a data source. That doesn’t transfer over to PDF.
4) A Mac user reported that the fonts were corrupted.

5) I saw some corrupted fonts in Windows. If I did a File > Save As… this problem went away.

Give OpenOffice a try and let me know what you think.

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.

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?

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?

If you would like to see some of the differences between Adobe’s three form creation tools (leaving out Dreamweaver and GoLive), take a look at this demo. It’s a Flash movie that shows how to create a “sum” field in Acrobat, LiveCycle Designer and Flash. This demo applies to Acrobat Professional 8 and LiveCycle Designer 8, but was created with Acrobat Professional 7 and LiveCycle Designer 7.

Go to demo.

Note: I’ll do some more Flash demos once Adobe lets me test a release candidate of Acrobat Profession 8 and LiveCycle Designer 8.

My earlier post on submitting form data via E-mail from Reader generated quite a few comments. I thought I would follow up with more details on how to make the process work.

1) Don’t use JavaScript. Reader won’t accept the very common e-mail JavaScript you have probably seen.

2) Do use html. Reader will recognize the html command “mailto:” as in “mailto:youremail@youraddress.com.” See the button on the left in my example.

This screen shot shows the basic setup.

To add a subject line, cc:, or bcc: see this Adobe TechNote.

3) Do not choose “PDF The Complete Document” in Export Options. Reader can only submit data from PDF forms unless the form has additional rights. If you choose “PDF The Complete Document” Reader assumes you are breaking the rules and will refuse to e-mail the document.

I’d stick with FDF as the data export format unless you have a specific reason for using another format.