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TIP 73: Customizing a Form in Adobe Designer 7

Adobe Designer 7 is a wonderfully complex program with all the features you could possibly want for building and configuring forms. In this tip, I'll mention some of those features as we make a very brief and introductory tour around the form created using a template, described in the previous tip.

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• Use the controls in the Standard toolbar to change page view and zoom options . These tools look and work the same as those found in Acrobat 7.

• Click an existing form field on the Body Pages view to make it active (Figure 73a). The field is surrounded by a hatched line. When you activate a field, information about the field is displayed in the status bar at the bottom of the program window.

  Figure 73a. Click a field to select it and display its information in the program.

  
  

  

• Information about the selected field is also displayed in the Field tab of the Object palette, docked at the right side of the program window by default. You can click the pull-down arrow and choose a different type of field from the list (Figure 73b).

  Figure 73b. Choose a type of form field from this pull-down list.

  
  

  

  Ever-Expanding Text Fields A dynamic form can contain dynamic text fields that grow according to the amount of text you type into them. When the text exceeds the default size of the field, scroll bars display. The field may extend across two pages of a form. If you want to add more information to the field, click the field on either pageall the text is activated.

• All the palettes include a More button click to choose options to hide the palette or open the Help menu.

• To see how your document looks as a PDF, click the PDF Preview tab at the top of the workspace to toggle the view. In this view the contents are added to the fields as well. For example, click a pull-down arrow on a list form field to see the contents added by the template (Figure 73c). Click the Body Pages tab to return to the default working view.

  Figure 73c. You can see the details of the form field in the PDF view; in this example the template added types of leaves to the pull-down list form field.

  
  

  

• Click the Hierarchy tab docked at the left of the program window to display the contents of the form according to its structure. Open and close Header and Body labels to see the contents; click a field in the listing to display it on the Body Pages view (Figure 73d).

  Figure 73d. Track the content of your form using the entries in the Hierarchy tab. In the figure, the text field txtEmpName is active both in the Hierarchy tab and on the Body Pages view.

  
  

  [View full size image]

  

  What About Barcodes? If you design a form that contains barcodes, your users can't add information to the fields. Instead, use an interactive barcode field so the components of the barcode change to encrypt the data entered in other fields. A paper form barcode is created using its own special field, and saves time ordinarily spent on manual data entry. To use paper form barcodes, you must use the Adobe Paper Forms Solution, an enterprise-level server product.

• Delete fields on the form by selecting them and pressing the Delete key. To move a field, drag it into its new position (Figure 73e). You can resize a field as well by dragging from a corner. When you move an object, use the Snap to Grid tool on the Standard toolbar for easy alignment.

  Figure 73e. Reposition a field by dragging it. As you move, the object's position displays in a tool tip.

  
  

  

• Replace content in a field, such as the default image added by the template. Click the object on the Body Pages to select it; the Draw tab in the Object palette is activated (Figure 73f). Click the Folder icon to open a dialog, locate and select the image you want to use, and click Open. The image is replaced at the size defined by the template. You can choose several sizing options, as shown in the figure.

  Figure 73f. Locate and set options for images in this tab of the Object palette.

  
  

  

• As you are learning to work with Adobe Designer 7, be sure to keep the How To palette active; this tab is docked at the lower right of the program window (Figure 73g). Click a More Info link in the default display in the tab, or click the Choose a topic pull-down arrow and select an option from the list.

  Figure 73g. Keep the How To palette active as you are learning how to use the program.