Creating Acrobat Forms - what do people use on the Mac?

[Scott_Melendez@adobeforums.com]

Since Adobe, in their wisdom, did not include LiveCycle Designer in Acrobat for the Mac, I'd like to see how people author form "templates", then add the actual form objects in Acrobat. Most of the PDF files I've been adding form elements to were designed elsewhere (Word, or sometimes Excel).

Do Mac users use InDesign? Word? Something else?

(And please, no "use Acrobat for Windows" replies.)

[MarkATS@adobeforums.com]

Acrobat Professional for Macintosh has the same form tools Acrobat for Windows does, but no Designer.

[Garrett_Cobarr@adobeforums.com]

Scott, if your going to start any PDF project in a tool outside of Acrobat, in other words create and export, the best tool, hands down and no competition, is InDesign. But InDesign does not have any where the amount of tools needed to add interactivity, user field objects and connectivity to other software like databases, other PDFs, XML, web pages. Or FDF.

After saying that: InDesign does have more real and sophisticated PDF elements for export than any other pre-Acrobat method. You can import media, create interactive form buttons (with very nice image placement for rollover) and create the basis for layer export. As far as I know, InDesign is the only application that creates and exports PDFs that can create form objects on different layers, not even Acrobat can do that.

But (don't you just hate buts) with InDesign you cannot create and export any JavaScript, there are no other form objects like text fields and it now makes PDFs that are much larger than what Acrobat would do, in fact just re saving a PDF in Acrobat Pro after an InDesign export will make it smaller.

But Acrobat, that does all the sweet and intense interactive development really and truly sucks at anything approaching good user experience design. Powerful, but many strengths of Acrobat and PDF go unnoticed because they lie hidden behind an arduous and unnecessarily complicated interface and a bias towards engineering along with an odd idea that Acrobat not be seen as a place to create documents but to 'finish' them. Most people are unaware that you can create a new document in Acrobat without bringing one in from another application, you just have to use JavaScript directly or create a custom menu.

So InDesign and Acrobat Pro make a great team. Quick, efficient, flexible and powerful. My only wish would be that they worked more closely together but it is as if they are in the same world only by divine accident.

There were a lot of Designer questions for awhile there on the Acrobat Scripting forums and Planet PDF but they seem to have died down mostly because no one could answer them. Since I am on a Mac I do not know how Adobe represented Designer to Acrobat windows users but it seem to thoroughly confuse them and they rarely worked within the PDF environment, as well as being huge for what they were supposed to do. But this has been explained to me that Designer is making XML forms not PDFs.

Ignore Designer, it is going the same way as Photoshop's diminutive companion, ImageReady: stand alone app for money that evolves into given away free with a product someone wants. Not exactly a ringing endorsement.

[Scott_Melendez@adobeforums.com]

Garrett,

Thank you for your thorough response.

Being fairly inexperienced with InDesign, I really didn't know how it would be in creating the "skeleton" for a form. Since I want to make InDesign the primary authoring application for my team's PDF workflow, I am learning. But I haven't seen examples created in InDesign. For example, one can create a Purchase Order in Word from one of their templates. Create a PDF from the blank document, then add the dynamic field elements in Acrobat. I have't seen examples of more "structured" ID documents that could be used in that manner. So, I agree, they do make a winning combo.

As for Designer: I have a Windows PC, and I've poked around Designer. Using it's built-in templates, it creates some good looking forms. It's much like creating a form in a relational database like FileMaker or Access, with some simple layout features. What's nice is the tight integration with Acrobat. I don't see why there couldn't be a Mac version. Maybe this can be done in FileMaker....

I think the confusion with Designer is it's integration with LiveCycle system, which is very complex. As a stand-alone forms design tool, it's good; but its interface could be simplified.