I just got word of two excellent new resources for those of you interested in Designer and LiveCycle, whether you use LiveCycle Designer specifically or the Designer that ships with Acrobat:
That’s right! The day has finally come. At the moment, Designer 8.0 is only shipping with Acrobat 8.0 Professional. You can download the trial to check it out.
Jeff Stanier, our product manager, has put together a great document detailing what’s new in Designer 8.0. This is a really nice upgrade with lots of really nice brand new features like an integrated spell checker, greatly improved PDF Form importing (as "artwork"), improved digital signature support, test data generation, ability to show all scripts in a container, support for transparency in PNG and GIF image files and much, much more including some nice little usability improvements to make it easier to work with your forms.
In the coming weeks, I’ll be giving more details on these features and I’ll also be transitioning to Designer 8.0 and Acrobat 8.0 for future tutorials, targeting Designer 7.x/Acrobat 7.x only where appropriate.
One of the nice things about Designer 8.0 is that it now supports side-by-side installations along with older versions, making it easy to have Designer 7.1 and Designer 8.0 on the same machine for comparison and testing.
I was showing someone how to use Designer 7.0 today and came across a bug in the Font palette. I was trying to show them how to make the caption of a text field bold without making the value bold using the Bold (“B”) button on the Font palette however I could only change both the caption and value fonts together, not separately as one should be able to do using the selector control located at the top of the palette (which reads, “Currently editing Caption and Value…” by default).
Using the selector control, you should be able to set it to “Currently editing Caption properties…”, press the bold button and make only the caption font bold. Unfortunately, that’s not what happens. Instead, both fonts (or, the entire field) is changed to bold.
Rest assured, this bug was immediately fixed in Designer 7.1 — a highly-recommended upgrade because tables were introduced in that version, amongst other things.
The good news is that there’s a simple workaround using script. All you need to do is use the Font palette to make sure that the Bold button isn’t activated (that the field isn’t bolded) and then set the following FormCalc script statements on field’s Initialize event using the Script Editor palette:
$.caption.font.typeface = "Myriad Pro"
$.caption.font.weight = "bold"
$.caption.font.size = "10pt"Feel free to specify a different font name or point size if you like although I would recommend using the same font name and point size as you specified in the Font palette so that the result doesn’t differ too much from what you see on the canvas.
Finally, preview the form as PDF using the canvas’s PDF Preview tab. When the form is initialized (loaded) in Acrobat, the field’s caption font will be set to the type, weight and size you specified.
Please refer to the Bug List for updated information on the version(s) affected by this bug as well as if and when it was/will be fixed.
I just noticed that Carl Young himself from Carl Young Training Associates is giving a new course on Designer 7 this Fall that looks very interesting (here’s the full course outline if you’re looking for details).
They’ll be in Phoenix, AZ, Nov. 13 – 14, 2006, and Houston, TX, Nov. 27 – 28, 2006.
If you use the “Page n of m” object from the Library palette’s Custom tab, you may have noticed a bug when you drag that object from the Library directly into a table cell:
In the image above, the “Page n of m” object circled in green is correct whereas the one circled in red is not.
If you preview the form or run it in stand-alone Acrobat, you’ll get something like this:
You can see, in the image above, that the green-circled object is showing the correct page information while the red-circled one isn’t showing any information at all. That’s because the text object from red-circled “Page n of m” object contains broken references to the Floating Fields which are used to display the current page and page count information.
The “Page n of m” is a special object that’s actually made-up of 3 separate fields:
The image above shows how the red- and green-circled objects in the first image are represented in the Hierarchy palette which clearly shows that each “Page n of m” object is a hybrid object made-up of 3 separate objects.
The “Page n of m” works by using what Designer calls Floating Fields where a field (such as CurrentPage) is referenced by another object’s text. In theory, that would mean that you should be able to place floating fields in captions as well as in text objects however Designer only supports them in text objects.
If you use the XML Source tab to look at the source for the green-circled object, you’ll see how this is done (please note that I’ve abbreviated it here for clarity):
<field name="CurrentPage" presence="hidden" access="readOnly"
id="floatingField011478"/>
<field name="PageCount" presence="hidden" access="readOnly"
id="floatingField029358"/>
<draw name="Pages">
<ui><textEdit/></ui>
<value>
<exData>
<body>
<p>
Page <span xfa:embed="#floatingField011478"/> of
<span xfa:embed="#floatingField029358"/>
</p>
</body>
</exData>
</value>
</draw>In the above XML source, you can see that the text object (named “Pages”) has valid references to the CurrentPage and PageCount fields because its “xfa:embed” tags use their pertaining IDs.
If we now look at the XML source for the red-circled (broken) “Page n of m” object, it’s clear that the text object’s references to the CurrentPage and PageCount fields are broken since the IDs used by the Page text object don’t match those assigned to the CurrentPage and PageCount hidden Floating Fields:
<subform>
<field name="CurrentPage" presence="hidden" access="readOnly"
id="floatingField025864_copy1_copy1_copy1"/>
<field name="PageCount" presence="hidden" access="readOnly"
id="floatingField015020_copy1_copy1_copy1"/>
<draw name="Pages">
<ui><textEdit/></ui>
<value>
<exData>
<body>
<p>
Page <span xfa:embed="floatingField025864"/> of
<span xfa:embed="floatingField015020"/>
</p>
</body>
</exData>
</value>
</draw>
</subform>This can be easily fixed by modifying the IDs of the CurrentPage and PageCount fields to be the ones that the Page text object is expecting them to be: floatingField025864 and floatingField015020, respectively. Once you’ve fixed the IDs, previewing the form should give you something like:
You can see now that the once-broken “Page n of m” object in the table cell is functioning properly.
Please refer to the Bug List for updated information on the version(s) affected by this bug as well as if and when it was/will be fixed.
