Did you know you could quickly access the Preview tab in the Form Properties dialog from the PDF Preview tab’s context menu?
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.
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Posted by Stefan Cameron on February 11th, 2010
Filed under
Designer,
Tips
Did you know that you could insert a line break, as opposed to a paragraph break, in between two lines in a text object using the [Shift + Enter] keyboard sequence?
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.
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Posted by Stefan Cameron on January 29th, 2010
Filed under
Acrobat,
Designer,
Tips,
XFA
The LiveCycle Product Blog has some recent information on the availability of the Designer ES2 Upgrade which can now be purchased on the Adobe Store.
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).
Posted by Stefan Cameron on January 14th, 2010
Filed under
Acrobat,
Designer
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,
Books,
Data Binding,
Designer,
Instance Manager,
Scripting,
Tables,
XFA
This is one of the references I find the most useful when writing scripts and it’s now available for Designer ES2.
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!
Posted by Stefan Cameron on November 12th, 2009
Filed under
Designer,
LiveCycle,
Scripting
