As I mentioned earlier, I’m working on a tutorial in the spirit of the Adobe MAX 2008 conference which I’ll make available next week. There will be 3 posts, one for each day of the conference.
This tutorial will show you how to (1) design a form with a table that has a repeating row, (2) add some Flex code to it that will enable the use of the mx.rpc.http.HTTPService class for retrieving data from my Movie Service and (3) design a form guide that will capture the data from the service and transfer it into the PDF which could then be used to print or archive the movie listings.
In an effort to wet your appetite, I thought I would get the ball rolling by showing a little preview of the final solution.
Be sure to come back every day, Monday to Wednesday next week (November 17-19, 2008), to get the full tutorial.
Posted by Stefan Cameron on November 14th, 2008
Filed under
Acrobat,
Conferences,
Designer,
Form Guides,
Tutorials
The XFA 2.8 spec is finally available on Adobe’s DevNet! XFA 2.8 is supported by Designer 8.2, Acrobat/Reader 9.0 and LiveCycle ES 8.2.
Posted by Stefan Cameron on November 11th, 2008
Filed under
Acrobat,
Designer,
XFA
As I mentioned earlier, Designer 8.2 now comes with frequently-requested advanced typography features: vertical and horizontal scaling, letter spacing and auto-kerning. This should help those of you trying to achieve a precise, high-fidelity layout, especially when you’re trying to reproduce a paper form with great precision to maintain compliancy.
As a nice compliment to Stephanie Legault’s post on text formatting, Alex Kalaidjian has produced yet another short video tutorial demonstrating these features in Designer 8.2.
Thanks to the LiveCycle Designer Team for these great posts and videos!
Posted by Stefan Cameron on October 31st, 2008
Filed under
Designer,
Tutorials
I just discovered yet another (not so new) LiveCycle blog which I thought you might find useful: The LiveCycle Documentation Team’s blog already has a few useful posts on a variety of LiveCycle-related subjects. They plan to use it to provide product documentation updates and additional information between releases.
Posted by Stefan Cameron on October 29th, 2008
Filed under
Designer,
Tutorials,
XFA
Target Version is a feature introduced in LiveCycle Designer 8.1 which alerts you to incompatibilities with various versions of Acrobat/Reader in your forms.
Whenever new versions of Acrobat and XFA are released, they introduce new features that previous versions don’t support. For example, the signature field’s “lock after signing” feature is only available as of Acrobat/Reader 8.0 and the hyperlink feature is only supported as of Acrobat/Reader 9.0. There are many other features that have similar version restrictions but how are you supposed to figure it out? When you’re designing your form, how can you be certain that your customers still using Reader 7.0.5 will be able to use it as you intended them to when you’re designing your form using the latest and greatest combination of Designer 8.2 and Acrobat 9.0?
That’s where Target Version becomes indispensable: By setting the “File > Form Properties > Defaults > Target Version” property to the version of Acrobat/Reader you want to target, you enable Designer to warn you when you use a feature that isn’t supported in that version. So if you target Acrobat/Reader 7.0.5 and you try to use hyperlinks, you’ll get a warning indicating that Acrobat/Reader 9.0+ is required to use hyperlinks.
To put this into perspective, Alex Kalaidjian, a developer on the LiveCycle Designer Team, has produced a short video tutorial demonstrating the usefulness of the Target Version feature.
Posted by Stefan Cameron on October 28th, 2008
Filed under
Acrobat,
Designer,
Tutorials,
XFA
