Adobe® Acrobat® 9 PDF Bible

Chapter 33. Using Adobe LiveCycle Designer ES (Windows Only)

When it comes to Acrobat and forms, essentially two different types of forms can be created with tools from your Acrobat Pro or Acrobat Pro Extended installation in Windows only. Acrobat Pro lets you create Adobe PDF forms within Acrobat on either Windows or Macintosh. In Windows, you have another tool installed with Acrobat Pro called Adobe LiveCycle Designer ES that is a separate executable application. Forms created in Adobe LiveCycle Designer ES (or simply Designer, or LiveCycle Designer as I refer to it in this chapter) are an XML Forms Architecture (XML), which is an application of XML for electronic forms.

What's important to remember is that PDF forms created in Acrobat are very different than XML forms created in LiveCycle Designer. Among other things, you can't edit XML forms in Acrobat, and there are some limitations to what you can do with Acrobat PDF forms you edit in Designer.

As a forms development tool, LiveCycle Designer is one of the best applications you can find to create forms that can be filled out and submitted using any Acrobat viewer. However, Designer is not a panacea for all forms development. You do have many opportunities for impressive forms creation in Acrobat, as I explain in the remaining chapters of this book.

For now, we're concerned with Designer and how to use the application to create XML forms. As I stated at the beginning of this book, the Adobe Acrobat 9 PDF Bible is not a book on ...