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.

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!

My friend Angie Okamoto (Easel Solutions) was the one who originally pointed this out to me. It’s incredibly useful, especially when you’re switching between various preview data files (or options like interactive vs non-interactive), because it loads the dialog and activates the Preview tab in a single step. This saves both mouse travel time and one click which adds-up to a lot, if you do this frequently.

Right-click on the PDF Preview tab to get the context menu:

Choose “Form Properties” and you’re right on the Preview tab:

Another option is to set a Shortcut Key for the Form Properties dialog, though this won’t auto-select the Preview tab (but still saves some mouse travel and a couple of clicks). You can do this via the “Tools > Keyboard Shortcuts” dialog:

Unfortunately, I don’t recall what version of Designer introduced the PDF Preview tab’s context menu nor which one added Keyboard Shortcuts but I think both should be available since version 8.0.

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 <p> 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 <br> 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 <br> 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.

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).

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.)

What’s more, you can now find all of the ES2 Developer and Programmer documentation all in a single place just like all ES2 documentation (which includes the Dev and Prog docs from the former link). Great sites to bookmark and nice to finally have it all in one spot!

This all comes to you due to the recent LiveCycle Developer Center site refresh in conjunction with the recent release of LiveCycle ES2. Check it out!