Letting The Form Wizard Guide You - Adobe ACROBAT 9 HOW-TOS Manual

232
Simplify Your Form
Building, Simplify
Your Life
Consider these ideas as you
build a form:
•
Make sure the design
of the document can
accommodate the size of
the fields you intend to
use.
•
Set options that are com-
mon to all fields, such as
the font and appearance,
when you build the first
field.
•
Develop a system for
adding and naming extra
fields.
•
When you want to
change one property of
several fields, such as the
alignment, don't change
each field individually.
Shift-click to select the
fields and then open
the Properties dialog
using the shortcut menu.
When you change the
alignment, the change
is applied to all the
selected fields.
•
JavaScript is written for
each field separately;
calculations aren't
allowed for a number of
selected fields.
C h a p t e r t w e l v e
86
#
Acrobat 9 Standard and Pro offer a form wizard to get your form-building
adventure under way. The wizard walks you through several form creation
options, such as using existing documents or scanned content. You can
start from either the Forms task button or program menu commands.
There are several ways to start the form—in the example, I'm using a
fax cover form created from an InDesign file.
Follow these steps to build the form:
1. In Acrobat 9 Standard or Pro, choose Forms > Start Form Wizard to
open the Create or Edit Form dialog.
2. Choose one of three options (Windows), including "An existing elec-
tronic document" (as in the example), "A paper form to be scanned, " or
"No existing form, " using either a blank page or a template to start from
scratch. On the Mac, you have two choices, including "Start with a PDF
document" or "A paper form. " Click Next.
Note
If you choose the "No existing form" option (available only in Windows),
LiveCycle Designer launches and displays the New Form Assistant.
3. Specify the document to use for the form. Choose "Use the current
document" if you already have your source file open in Acrobat, or
choose "Import a file from file system" and click Browse (Find) to locate
and select the file for the form. Click Next.
4. The document is processed, and fields automatically appear on the
page using the artificial intelligence feature in Acrobat.
5. An information dialog opens explaining that you are in Form Edit
mode and that fields are added to the form (Figure 86a). You also see
an example of a field and its components. Once you've read the dialog,
click "Don't show again" to save a mouse click in the future. Click OK to
close the dialog.
Creating and Handling Forms
letting the Form wizard
Guide You
From the Library of Daniel Dadian