New York City Acrobat User Group
Meeting Notes Archive
April 11. 2007
We had a terrific get together on Wednesday, April 11at the NYPL Science, Industry and Business Library on 34th Street. Jonathan Wasserman, Deputy Director of Process and Information Management for the New York City Housing Authority, gave us an overview of Forms and form making in Acrobat. Many of us, I think, were impressed with the breadth and depth of the possibilities of using Acrobat (with JavaScript functionality) in making a form…. forms for all uses.
Jonathan noted the “important issue is making sure the end user can complete the form and the form owner gets the information they need.”
It’s important, Jonathan noted, to pay attention to the following:
- Define the problem that the client is trying to address…. they may often just describe the symptom rather than the problem.
- There are no form types that are “better” than another type. It depends on the final requirements.
- You need to have clear idea of the business process…. who needs to do what to the form and at what point in the process.
Similarly, you need to decide if it should be an Acrobat form or an HTML form, and keep in mind that even the form is filled out as an HTML form the final output can be PDF form for the end user, which can be used or stored.
Touching briefly on LiveCycle forms, Jonathan noted that LiveCycle forms are not backwards compatible with older versions of Acrobat (pre Acrobat 6), and are not easily converted back to traditional AcroForm technology . Also, when implementing LiveCycle forms you have far fewer choices (at this time) in terms of third part developers who provide advanced functionality. Therefore, moving to LiveCycle forms is a significant IT decision, and may not be the way to go until your organization has a good idea what it plans to do in the future.
Jonathan also noted that just about any design tool can be used for the visual presentation, and that the form fields can be added to that. He reviewed the types of Form field elements, and their use.
Jonathan also talked about JavaScript, which he described as “the most powerful part of your toolkit.” He noted that JavaScript can be used at various points in form creation:
- Application level
- Document level
- Page level
- Field level
He also gave us several sources for finding JavaScripts on other resources, and sources for learning more on our own, including, of course, this Web site!
Presentation
Download a copy of Jonathan's ppresentation
Download [PDF: 1.2 Mb]
Sample JavaScripts
This PDF file contains sample JavaScripts
The 20+ members of the NYC group present, as well as the 20+ members participating via Adobe “Connect” all felt this was a very worthwhile meeting. Plus, we had a delicious lunch, and of course, an Adobe “raffle” of several books and other goodies! Hope you will all show up for our next meeting….sometime in July.
Photos from the meeting
