Ok, so I don't talk much about PDF because, probably like most of you, I just don't think about it. PDF is just how forms are done (mostly). Today my wife brought me a list of forms I had to print out for my son's new school. It was quite a list - a good ten forms or so. I anticipated a lot of: click, print, back, repeat.
However - the school did something intelligent. They put all 10 forms in one PDF. All I had to do was load and print.
I know I'm making a big deal of something simple, but I haven't seen that before and I thought it was nice.
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now if only you could have filled out the forms, signed them, and had them emailed back to the school! sigh....I wish livecycle server wasn't impossibly expensive :/
> lifecycle server
<shrug>
That's what ColdFusion is for :-)
If you have Adobe Acrobat Professional 7 (not the reader), there is a new feature called "Typewriter" that lets you fill out any PDF form print it, save it, etc. It is a relatively unkown feature that was rolled out in the .05 update. It makes PDFs truly useful
Derek P - yeah, good point there.
PDF forms (FDF) can be submitted to a CF server. No need for Livecycle on that point alone. In fact you can buy Adobe Pro and put additional business logic into your PDF forms with fancier form elements and validation logic. It is when you go to the ultimate level of integration you gain benefit of using Livecycle. Microsoft has a simular tier product called InfoPath. They are seeking to capture some of the Livecycle market. (Adobe needs to do a better job marketing to the public that they have such a product! The silence is giving MS an edge in the market.)
In my experience, the issue is a little more complicated than enabling the form features in Acrobat Pro...
That assumes that the person creating the form knows about the feature, uses an input field with the correct type (rather than a line of underscores ____ ) and additionally uses a database to store the results rather than a paper folder or Excel. (sigh)
At least Adobe is making it easier for those of us who have to go behind and improve usability for the visitors
Since when can CF create *digital* signable forms?
If anything I heard it might be a CF 8 feature. maybe. :)