Ted Padova’s AUC Blog

I recently downloaded OpenOffice.org for my Mac and Windows machines. Perhaps many of you have been working with OpenOffice much longer, but this is a report of my initial flirtation with the programs and I wanted to see what kinds of PDF related things I could do with OpenOffice.org Writer. Particularly in the area of creating PDF forms.

I’m a little late with my first look at OpenOffice since people like Carl Young here on Acrobat Users reported on using OpenOffice for forms design back in April. Take a look at Carl’s posts OpenOffice as an Acrobat Form Design Tool and More on OpenOffice as a Form Design Tool.

Admittedly I have much to learn about the program, so perhaps anyone passing by this blog post can help me out with adding your impressions to working with OpenOffice.org Writer and exporting to PDF.

For those who don’t know, OpenOffice applications export directly to PDF. OpenOffice.org Writer also supports creating live form fields and exporting to PDF. For a free downloadable application, you’ll find many impressive features in the program.

Designing a Form

The design atmosphere in Writer emulates a similar interface to Adobe LiveCycle Designer more than it does with Adobe Acrobat. If you’re familiar with creating forms in Designer, then poking around in OpenOffice should be much easier for you.

In the design arena, I found some interesting tools and features in Writer. I personally like to design forms in Adobe InDesign just for the sheer unlimited design potential that InDesign offers. In my opinion the Table features in InDesign are unsurpassed by any other application I’m familiar with. Not to mention other kinds of design elements you can add only in InDesign. Take a look at Figure 1 as an example. There’s no way I could create the same look in any program but InDesign.

Figure 1
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In OpenOffice however I found some features not supported in InDesign. My impression is that, overall, OpenOffice is a little clumsier laying out a form than InDesign as Carl attests in his articles, but OpenOffice does have some very nice features not found in InDesign. As an example the Formula command in the Table menu enables you to add formulas to individual cells. I find this feature very nice when designing a form. InDesign hasn’t quite evolved to being a design application for PDF forms so obviously as yet, we wouldn’t expect InDesign to support formulas in cells and formatting cells for data.

The clumsiness I find is no doubt, in part, due to my own limitations in knowing the program well. I guess it’s hard to get away from enjoying the freedom that a program like InDesign offers you where you can plunk down any text or graphic anywhere on the page and freely drag objects around. I’m more of a non-structured form designer and think about layout as I’m creating a form rather than plan it all out ahead of time. With OpenOffice similar to LiveCycle Designer you are restricted to working in a much more structured environment. Placement of tables, text, and objects on a new layout are fixed to positions and I had a devil of a time trying to move things around the page.

Exporting to PDF

Without delving into the complex areas of using subforms and many more advanced features that OpenOffice.org Writer offers you, I created a simple form using the Table features and exported to PDF. I really wanted to see if those form fields are live in Acrobat and if it all works as I designed the form. Unfortunately, I just didn’t spend enough time trying to figure out getting the formula right for adding a column of numbers. Again, this is my limitation in using the application. I believe it does hold a lot of promise for the skilled form designer familiar with the program.

One discovery I found that I think is very important for those who may use OpenOffice for creating PDF forms, is that everything was fine in Acrobat for making modifications to my form. I used Acrobat to calculate a column of fields and saved the file. No problem here. However, when I chose Save As and rewrote the file, the result was a garbled mess as you can see in Figure 2. I found this anomaly equal on both Windows and the Macintosh.

Figure 2

There are some font issues going on with OpenOffice that I haven’t figured out yet. The one thing you need to be certain about if you decide to create some forms in OpenOffice is to be certain to check your work and make sure every aspect of the form is properly designed and functional.

I’m with Carl when he raised the question related to the flexibility of using XML type forms in Acrobat. An Adobe Live Cycle Designer form can’t be optimized with the PDF Optimizer in Acrobat, you can’t embed an index file, you can’t add headers and footers/watermarks and backgrounds, and you can’t add any comments or markups. You can’t insert LiveCycle Designer forms into a PDF document, edit initial views, nor add links or buttons for interactivity. You can add Designer forms to a PDF Package, but that’s about the only thing you can do in Acrobat related to any kind of editing. And, of course the most important issue is that you can’t edit a single form field in Acrobat.

On the other hand, forms created with OpenSource can take advantage of all the editing features you have with other PDF documents. You can do all the above, edit text, place images, and just about anything else Acrobat has to offer.

All in all I haven’t seen enough in OpenOffice to suggest to anyone that you use the program exclusively for PDF forms creation. There may be some benefits for using OpenOffice as a design tool, but adding the polish on your form is much better handled in Acrobat. Perhaps it could be a great companion product to Acrobat when it matures, but I don’t see Open Office completely replacing Acrobat or LiveCylce Designer.

I’d be interested in knowing your thoughts on using OpenOffice to create PDF forms.

ted

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 25th, 2007 at 10:51 pm and is filed under Forms Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.