Acrobat Forms

[Lukas Engqvist]

Had a customer ask me to make a form, they wanted an estimate.
I knew that there was forms recognition in Acrobat 9, so I thought 10 minutes, but letts put some time for plan B and testing, so 5 page form 2 hours.

Did I underestimate… lol

First Acrobat only managed to recognise half the pages.
The reordering tab order and structure can only be done one field at the time, unless you cut and paste, which means you risk crashing and out of memory even with 6gig RAM and quad G5.
Took the job home and while watching a move end up doing about 1 click every 5 minutes, that's how long response can be for resizing.
No Align objects tools, no smart guides…Â*is this really something Adobe designed? Remidns me of how pitstop was behaving in Acrobat 4. Put enfocus are far better now ;P.

Is there any preference to turbo forms?

 

[Tech]

Do you have access to Acrobat LiveCycle Designer for PC. It's more robust than Acrobat (Mac) default form functions, which you already know does a poor job at field recognition.

 

[gig0]

Does LiveCycle Designer unlock the limitation that prevents unlimited users the ability to save form data in Reader, or is that the $80,000 version?

 

[Lukas Engqvist]

LiveCycle ripped the file to shreds

LiveCycle ripped the file to shreds

Looked much worse in Designer. Got font errors and a bunch of stuff. If I had access to the original file maybe it would have been easier, all I got was a PDF.
What is really wierd is like a 2 column by 20 rows that is repeated 4 times across the page, tab order sucks and reordering one filed at a time will mean 80 fields dragging and dropping in tab order list, giving 5 minutes for screen refresh, this is one nightmare ahead.

 

[leonardr]

Poorly made PDFs are hard to turn into quality forms - recognition is difficult (if not impossible).
As for the other comments, there are other ways to do ordering and grouping of the fields. BUT AcroForms are for simple forms, complex forms are for Designer. And you might want to look at the options you chose there...

 

[rich apollo]

Why is LiveCycle a Windows-only product? Is that gonna' change some time in the future?

 

[Lukas Engqvist]

Designer does not preserve the visual inegrity

Designer does not preserve the visual inegrity

Designer works fine in english, it is ruining my scandinavian characters. I know that if I had the original file it would make it easier, but I have been told that I am not getting any other source information.
There is still no excuse that duplicating a set of 2 fields 20 down and 2 across should reorder the fields happhazardly, so that all fields need to be re-arranged, that combined with reordering tab order is a one feld at a time operation.
Duplicating fields has a 3 decimal measurement for x and y but seems to snap to some kind of grid that is invisible to the user. (have tried changing the document grid to no avail).

 

[Thierry]

Lukas,
I completely agree with you about the problems encountered while copying and pasting (it's so slow that you first think the application crashed, even with only about ten fields selected) but there are some objects alignement tools. If you right-click on selected objects, you may choose to align them and it works.
When I tried to use the automatic form creation process, I found it far more efficient with PDF coming from InDesign than with those made with XPress (bad recognition of features, replacement of some french special characters…).
Adobe has still a lot of work to do if they want us to use PDFs as forms on the internet.

 

[leonardr]

Adobe has still a lot of work to do if they want us to use PDFs as forms on the internet.

PDF forms have been in use since Acrobat 4 (1998) - that's 10 years.

What do you believe is missing in making PDF forms technology viable?

Leonard

 

[gig0]

Ability to save form data in reader as many times as you want without spending 80 grand.

 

[Thierry]

Thanks for your response, Leonard. I know that Acrobat Forms are not new but those functions were left (almost) unchanged for a very long time. Now, Adobe seems to find more interest in them and I do think that Acrobat.com, for instance, is very interesting. It can be quite usefull to make a survey or for subscription if you don't have the possibility to do it with HTML forms.

But when you post a form on the website, your contacts (customers…) have to login to get access to your document (even if the document is public) and to download it in order to use it with Adobe Reader. It's not a big deal but people are always loosing their login and password or can be frightened by the process.

About Acrobat itself, I don't think that there is something really missing but there is a lot of features to improve. First, as Lukas noted, it's sometimes very slow even with a fairly decent computer. I don't have access to Designer but it should be possible to create a one-page form (some text fields for personnal informations and radio buttons or check boxes for additional informations) in Acrobat without spending a lot of time waiting for a simple operation to complete.

As another example, did you try to use the combo boxes (I hope that this is the right name in english) in Acrobat? If you make a mistake during the creation of the list of items, correcting it can be really tricky. You can choose a default value by clicking on it but it's often impossible to click on the choosen item! It just jumps back to the previous one. It's not very user-friendly. It's sad because Acrobat could be a good tool for forms, with all is advantages over competitors.

 

[leonardr]

Ability to save form data in reader as many times as you want without spending 80 grand.

First, You can SAVE from Reader as many times as you want...The EULA says NOTHING about saving.

Of course, if you Reader enable a form using Acrobat Professional, then only 500 copies of that form can be returned to you for processing.

Second, I don't know where you go that $$ figure - but it's wrong. The cost of LiveCycle Reader Extension Server (the product in question) differs based on how many forms and/or how many people you plan to distribute you.

 

[gig0]

Yes, it was Reader Extension Server. I got that quote from an Adobe rep after providing my personal information, blood type, and first born child. They didn't make it easy, believe me. Of course this was 2 years ago (pre-Acrobat 8) and I was so turned off by the pricing structure and felt unless I worked for the government or Exxon, there's no chance I would be seeing it (or even a lousy screen shot) anytime soon. Anyways, I guess I misinterpreted the fine print as saving only 500 copies, although I'm not surprised Adobe removed one restriction and added another. This is why it's so frustrating. I just wish they would finally unleash the potential of intelligent forms to the masses without the restrictions and per-use pricing tiers.

 

[Lukas Engqvist]

Would be nice to have the align and distribute available in the menu bar, just so that you know that it is there. Not used to having commands ONLY available by contextual menu. Usually mainmenu, toolbar are the first signs of ana available command.

What I am really missing is the ability to shift-click or command click to select multiple (consecutive or non consecutive) fields to for allignment ot rearanging tab order.

Using the distribute I can work around the erratic placement of the Place Multiple function.
Thank you for the tip.