I wasn’t sure I could actually blog about this update due to licensing issues but hey, they just did on the LiveCyle Blog. I guess it’s all in the wording.
In particular, this 8.2.1 SP2 update resolves a nasty bug where your form would grow to multiple megabytes in size due to a processing instruction (PI) being repeated thousands of times for a particular field. The PI looks like this (though the value, ‘aped3’, may differ):
<?templateDesigner StyleID aped3?>
Thankfully, this bug doesn’t occur often but when it does, the most common symptoms are:
- reduced performance when working in Designer;
- form file bloat (into the multiple MBs); and
- crashes when working in Designer with the form open.
If you can’t update Designer due to your licensing agreement and you come across this bug, you’ll need to go to the XML Source and look for a processing instruction like the one quoted above. It’ll be there many, many times. Just delete all occurrences. If your form is saved as an XDP, then you can exit Designer and open it in Notepad (or some other text editor) and delete it that way as well. Then re-open it in Designer.
Updated: March 28, 2009
Posted by Stefan Cameron on March 17th, 2009
Filed under
Bugs,
Designer,
LiveCycle
I am certain at some point in time you have had to fill-out some type of form on a website and the required fields were identified by an asterisk (*). This is a common way to communicate to a user which fields are mandatory and which ones aren’t.
This is a design pattern that the Form Guide Team adopted when they conceived the default Form Guide user experience. Since the appearance of a field in a form guide doesn’t have to be the same as that of the field in the form (PDF), they were able to automatically add an asterisk next to mandatory fields without affecting their PDF counterparts.
Continue reading…
Posted by Stefan Cameron on March 16th, 2009
Filed under
Acrobat,
Form Guides,
Scripting,
Tutorials
In case you missed it, John Brinkman posted a great article on how to extract more information from a JavaScript exception (caught in a try/catch block). Have a look — there’s lots of useful information in the exception object and it’s just a matter of knowing how to expose it. It could save you hours of debugging time!
Posted by Stefan Cameron on March 13th, 2009
Filed under
Debugging,
Scripting
Everyone using Acrobat/Reader 9.0 (on both Windows and Mac) should now upgrade to the just-released 9.1 version which includes a number of bug fixes as well as a fix to a critical security vulnerability. The link has information about the vulnerability that has been addressed in the patch as well as links to the downloads for each flavor (Win, Mac, Reader, Pro, Extended…). Updates to earlier versions of Acrobat/Reader are also available.
Updated Mar 18, 2009
Posted by Stefan Cameron on March 11th, 2009
Filed under
Acrobat
Did you know that transparency in GIF and 8-bit PNG images is supported as of Designer and Acrobat/Reader 8.0?
If you have an image that has a transparent area in it (perhaps you have an odd-shaped logo which you want to place on a colored background in your form), you can save it as a GIF or 8-bit PNG with a single color indexed as transparent.
There are various PNG formats: 8-bit, 24-bit and 32-bit. The 8-bit format is supported and uses an indexed color table in which colors may be marked as transparent (only one of which is supported in Designer/Acrobat/Reader). The 24-bit format is also supported and provides true colors (non-indexed) but no transparency. Finally, the 32-bit format allows for varying degrees of transparency (i.e. an alpha channel) within the image but is not supported at this time.
The GIF format is at most 8-bit and uses an indexed color table in which colors may be marked as transparent however Designer/Acrobat/Reader only supports one transparent color within the color index.
Updated: May 26, 2009
Posted by Stefan Cameron on March 9th, 2009
Filed under
Acrobat,
Designer
