Adobe® Acrobat® 8 PDF Bible

Chapter 33. Designing PDF Forms (Windows Only)

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Understanding Adobe's form design strategy

• Understanding the kind of forms you can create with Designer

• Creating static forms in Adobe Designer

• Using PDF backgrounds

• Creating dynamic XML forms

• Converting designer forms to Acrobat forms

• Enabling forms with Reader extensions

• Understanding data connections

• Tips for learning Designer

When it comes to Acrobat and forms, essentially two different types of forms can be created with tools from your Acrobat Professional installation in Windows only. Acrobat Professional lets you create Adobe PDF forms within Acrobat on either Windows or the Macintosh. In Windows, you have another tool installed with Acrobat Professional called Adobe LiveCycle Designer that is a separate executable application. Forms created in Adobe LiveCycle Designer (or simply Designer, or Adobe Designer as I refer to it in this chapter) are an XML Forms Architecture (XML), which is an application of XML for electronic forms.

What's important to remember is that PDF forms created in Acrobat are very different than XML forms created in Adobe Designer. Among other things, you can't edit XML forms in Acrobat and there are some limitations to what you can do with Acrobat PDF forms you edit in Designer.

As a forms development tool, Adobe Designer is one of the best applications you can find to create forms that can be filled out and submitted using any Acrobat viewer. However, Designer is not a panacea for all forms development. ...