Adobe Acrobat 7 TIPS and TRICKS THE 100150 BEST [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Chapter EIGHT. Working with Acrobat Forms

One of the coolest features in Acrobat 7 Professional is the ability to design a form that grants form fill-in rights to users working with Adobe Reader 7. A form can now be used with even greater versatility by the literally millions of people that use Adobe Reader 7.

Acrobat 7 Professional offers two methods of forms creation depending on your operating system. For both Windows and Mac, you can construct forms using the Forms tools. If you are working with Windows, you have access to the entire Adobe Designer 7 program, integrated as part of Acrobat 7 Professional.

What makes up a form? What's the point? What's the best way to design a form? And how do you automate the processes you can program into a form field?

These are big questions. You have the same flexibility in designing forms in Acrobat as you do in creating and designing PDF documents of other types. You can design a form from scratch, based on a document you create in another program, or based on a PDF document. If you are working with Adobe Designer, you can choose any of these three options, or use a template, as we describe in Tips 72 and 73. The option you choose is based on your expertise and your existing source materials.

Don't approach form design casually. Plan ahead, storyboard the form, and decide what you want it to do. See how to construct and troubleshoot a simple form, and how to add features to let your users work with your forms easier.

As with other tasks you perform in Acrobat, you can customize how you fill in forms, and set a wide range of forms preferences as well.