PDF Forms Bible Review
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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.
Posted by Stefan Cameron on November 13th, 2009
Filed under Acrobat, Data Binding, Designer, FormCalc, LiveCycle, Scripting, Tables
