Stefan Cameron on Forms » Acrobat

Adobe Acrobat X Sneak Peak

Stefan Cameron — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 21:41:37 +0000

The new version of Acrobat, Acrobat X (pronounced “10″ like the number, not “x” like the letter), has been announced and the Acrobat User Community has a couple of “first look” eSeminars that you might want to join in order to see what’s new before the official release/ship date about 30 days away:

New LiveCycle Enterprise Cafe Knowledge Application

Stefan Cameron — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 16:24:06 +0000

There is a new version of Adobe LiveCycle Café, renamed Adobe Enterprise Café, available for download. The new version lets you “aggregate content related to Adobe LiveCycle ES (Enterprise Suite), Acrobat, Connect, ColdFusion, and the Adobe Flash Platform in a timely and customized fashion.”

If you haven’t tried this out yet, it’s a great knowledge tool that lets you search across the entire Adobe Developer Community and Adobe DevNet resources, as well as get news updates, feeds, online training, events, etc., all in a single Adobe AIR application. You can even chat with other Adobe Developers who are online.

Acrobat JavaScript Debugger on XFA Forms

Stefan Cameron — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 17:14:30 +0000

Many of you have been requesting some debugging features for XFA Forms (and I’m sure many more of you just haven’t voted for it yet). It so happens that Acrobat Pro has a JavaScript Debugger which can be used — to a limited extent — with XFA Forms. See John Brinkman’s post to learn more about it — thanks John!

As he puts it, there are limitations, the biggest ones of them being, in my opinion, the inability to debug script objects and the inability to retain breakpoints between debugging sessions. Nonetheless, this tool can give you way more insight than the good old “JavaScript Console + saveXML(‘pretty’)” combination can in certain cases, and it does it in a nice tree to boot!

Tech Talk on Database Connected Forms

Stefan Cameron — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 09:46:15 +0000

Paul Guerette, a colleague of mine at Adobe, will be giving a “tech talk” eSeminar on connecting forms to databases over at AcrobatUsers.com on Tuesday, March 23, 2010, at 10am PST (1pm EST).

If you have been struggling with connecting a form to a database, are wanting to know what the best practices and/or security concerns are, or have some specific questions you would like to ask, I highly recommend you attend the session. It’s free to attend (and free to become a member in order to attend)!

I’ll be answering chat questions “live” as the session unfolds. I hope you can join us!

Tip: Inserting Line Breaks in Text

Stefan Cameron — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 16:51:01 +0000

Did you know that you could insert a line break, as opposed to a paragraph break, in between two lines in a text object using the [Shift + Enter] keyboard sequence?

When editing the contents of a text object, pressing the [Enter] key will produce a paragraph break which means that any Above and/or Below Spacing you have specified will come into effect, amongst other paragraph formatting-related properties. Under the hood, the effect is the insertion of a “new line” character (\n) in a plain text object or a new

tag in a rich (XHTML) text object.

Sometimes, however, you need to break a line without producing a new paragraph. For example, you might have a long URL to insert and, given its position within the contents, it ends-up being broken onto another line and you would prefer to keep it on a single line, yet part of the same paragraph. To do this, use the [Shift + Enter] keyboard sequence. The result is a “soft” break to another line without moving to a new paragraph. Under the hood, this translates into the insertion of a U+2029 Unicode break character in plain text or a
tag in rich (XHTML) text.

Those of you using a version of Designer which precedes the 8.2.1 release should note that when using [Shift + Enter] in a plain text object, the contents of the object gets converted into rich text since previous versions of Designer would always use the
tag to denote a line break. Designer 8.2.1 coincided with the release of Acrobat/Reader 9.0 which provided improvements to the Text Engine in order to support the plain text U+2029 Unicode break character.

Line Breaks in Acrobat/Reader

What I describe above relates to the authoring experience in Designer. Inserting line breaks (as opposed to paragraph breaks) while filling a form in Acrobat/Reader is different. John Brinkman explains the “why and how” in this post.

Sample Form

Download Sample [pdf]

I have included a sample for that demonstrates the different types of breaks in both plain and rich text objects. I also included a text field that has a multi-line rich text caption (the contents of the rich text object) and a multi-line default value (the contents of the plain text object), both using paragraph and line breaks. (If you’re wondering how I got those values into the caption and default value properties, I used good old Copy & Paste in both cases.)

Minimum Sample Requirements: I authored this sample using Designer 8.2.1.2 and Acrobat 9.3. It should work back to Acrobat 9.0. I’m unsure of the results in earlier versions of Designer and Acrobat due to the use of the U+2029 character in plain text.

Purchase Designer ES2 Upgrade

Stefan Cameron — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 17:23:28 +0000

The LiveCycle Product Blog has some recent information on the availability of the Designer ES2 Upgrade which can now be purchased on the Adobe Store.

Note that, going forward, Designer will no longer be available for purchase apart from Acrobat Pro or Workbench (i.e. you will no longer be able to purchase Designer without purchasing one of these two other products).

Acrobat/Reader 9.3 Now Available

Stefan Cameron — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 17:11:23 +0000

The Adobe Reader Blog has a recent post describing what’s new with these security updates. Amongst other things, there is now a JavaScript Blacklist Framework which “provides customers granular control over the execution of specific JavaScript API calls.”

There is also an 8.2 update to Acrobat/Reader which includes some of these features as well.

Sunset for Adobe Reader and Acrobat 7

Stefan Cameron — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 14:17:14 +0000

As of December 28, 2009, Adobe will no longer be supporting Acrobat and Reader 7.x. Thankfully, there’s a transition plan in place for those who work in more “controlled environments”. See the link for more information.

PDF Forms Bible Review

Stefan Cameron — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 23:13:18 +0000

Last February, I announced the release of a new Designer book titled, “PDF Forms Using Acrobat and LiveCycle Designer Bible”.

Over the past few months, I had the opportunity to review it and I thought I would share my comments, with respect to the second-half of the book, which deals with LiveCycle Designer ES and XFA forms, to help you decide if it would be a good book for you*. (The first-half deals with authoring PDF forms, a.k.a. AcroForms, in Acrobat and is beyond the scope of my blog.)

Pros:

explains the licensing agreement involved when enabling forms for Reader using Acrobat’s “Extend Features in Adobe Reader” feature (p. 268) — this is a frequently-used feature however its governing licensing agreement, seldom understood, is explained here in “plain English”;
presents and reasons through different design approaches for a particular solution, helping the reader make an informed decision on the best course of action;
anything and everything you could possibly want to know is dealt with in some way;
lots of important, time-saving insights in the inline ‘notes’;
something for everyone from beginner to advanced;
many cross-references between various topics, making it very easy to start in any chapter and still find all the information you need.

Caution:

risk of “information overload” — use this book as reference since it’s not a light read, though their goal is simply to present a myriad of options and let you pick the one that best suits your needs.

Overview of Topics Covered:

all about tables (from simple layouts to advanced);
data merging with bindings;
Designer user interface details and lots of tips and tricks for accelerating form layout tasks;
working with static forms (with PDF backgrounds) and dynamic forms, highlighting the differences;
great details on all sorts of pagination options;
lots of detail on JavaScript and FormCalc, good scripting exercises with explanations, debugging tips, table with JavaScript and equivalent FormCalc functions to make it easy to script in either language if the other is more familiar to you;
form deployment options;
when and how to use data connections in your forms (XML, schema, database, web service) and setting data bindings;
great overview of LiveCycle ES, its components (e.g. LC Forms, LC Reader Extensions, LC Rights Management, LC Content Services, etc.) and what they do.

This book is available now on Amazon.com and Wiley.com and elsewhere.

* Please note that these opinions are not necessarily those of Adobe Systems Incorporated.

New Versions of Reader and Acrobat

Stefan Cameron — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 17:46:40 +0000

On Oct 13, 2009, Adobe released a security bulletin providing information about new versions of Reader and Acrobat that address various critical vulnerabilities.

The new versions are:

Acrobat/Reader 9.2
Acrobat/Reader 8.1.7
Acrobat/Reader 7.1.4

The Adobe Updater application should automatically download and install the latest version the next time you run Acrobat/Reader. Otherwise, you should definitely consider installing the updates to protect your computer. Download links are available in the security bulletin.