That’s right: The day has finally come! Designer officially has its very first book on the market, thanks to J.P. Terry at SmartDoc Technologies.
The book is the result of J.P.’s own expertise and a collaborative effort with the Designer Team in Ottawa. It tackles form design and techniques in building dynamic XML-based PDF forms with Designer.
As Alan Siegel (Founder & Chairman of Siegel+Gale, branding pioneer and champion of simplifying corporate communications) put it,
“J.P. Terry is a rare individual who understands both the design and technical issues involved with effective communications. This book will teach you about LiveCycle Designer but more importantly it will teach you about effective form design.”
How to get the book
The book is now available for immediate ordering at the following sites
as well as at various local bookstores.
For some reason, it’s still on “pre-order” status at Amazon.com but should be “officially” available shortly.
The Designer book will also be available for purchase at MAX 2007 and I will be giving away a copy or two at my hands-on sessions on Designing PDF Forms and Flex-based Form Guides so be sure to attend if you’re at MAX 2007 North America!
Sample Files Posted
For those of you who already have the book, you can now download the sample files from SmartDocTech.com.
Posted by Stefan Cameron on August 30th, 2007
Filed under
Books,
Designer,
Instance Manager,
Scripting,
Tables,
Tutorials
The new book on LiveCycle Designer is currently scheduled to arrive next Monday, August 27, according to the Amazon listing. What’s more is that the price has been reduced to $44.99 (at the time I wrote this post)! There’s also an updated front cover image. Check it out — it should be a very useful resource.
Posted by Stefan Cameron on August 22nd, 2007
Filed under
Designer
Adobe recently published a whole collection of documents for Designer. In particular, Designer documentation is now available online via LiveDocs.
Under the Develop Tab, you’ll find documentation on the following topics as they pertain to Designer:
- Designer Help (LiveDocs)
- Form Guides (“getting started” guide)
- Scripting Basics
- Scripting Reference
- Target Version Reference (to know what features of XFA and Designer are supported in specific versions of Acrobat — this is what the new Target Validation feature in Designer is intended to help you manage)
- Transformation Reference (to know what’s supported if you’re targeting HTML)
- FormCalc Reference
Posted by Stefan Cameron on June 25th, 2007
Filed under
Designer,
FormCalc,
Scripting,
Tutorials
I was just notified that the XFA 2.5 specification has been posted to the Adobe LiveCycle Developer Center. For many of you, this is the end of a very long wait, I’m sure. Hopefully it contains all the information you’ve been looking for.
XFA 2.5 is supported by Designer 8.0 and Acrobat/Reader 8.0.
Posted by Stefan Cameron on June 19th, 2007
Filed under
Acrobat,
Designer,
XFA
Since I posted about the new Acrobat/Reader 8.1 Update, I’ve had a few inquires about whether this also updates Designer. In fact, one of my readers recently pointed-out the fact that I was mistaken in thinking that the Acrobat update wasn’t also updating Designer. I’m glad some of you on top of this — sometimes there are just too many things to keep track of. 😉
The fact is that Designer does, in fact, get updated but only if you’re installing the Acrobat Pro 8.1 update since that’s the only way you can get the retail version of Designer 8.0. This means that if you have both Reader 8.0 and Acrobat Pro 8.0 installed on the same machine and you install only the Reader 8.1 update, Designer will not be updated (hence my mistake in thinking Designer wouldn’t get updated in any scenario).
As you can see here,
Designer gets a minor update to version 8.05 when you install the Acrobat Pro 8.1 update. This update to Designer contains only major bug fixes and not any new functionality (i.e. you won’t get any of the new LC Designer ES, a.k.a. version 8.1, features like Form Fragments and the Guide Builder Tool).
To get LC Designer ES, you’ll have to purchase an upgrade later this Summer for a small fee (same deal as when Designer 7.1 was released a couple of years ago). That’s because LC Designer ES introduces significant changes and a host of brand new, powerful features.
I apologize to those whom I led astray about the Designer 8.05 update.
Posted by Stefan Cameron on June 14th, 2007
Filed under
Acrobat,
Designer
