Which program do you design documents that include form fields?

Forum|Forum|10 years ago
May 4, 2016
1 reply
788 views

I am learning that creating documents from scratch in Acrobat DC has challenges such as text pagination. I like LiveCycle but it requires reader extensions which is too expensive for small business.

I would like to hear from everyone: Which program do you prefer to design documents from scratch that include form fields?

This topic has been closed for replies.

G

George_Johnson

Inspiring

Forms created in LiveCycle Designer are not required to be enabled by LiveCycle Reader Extensions. As I said in another one of your posts, you can enabled XFA forms with Acrobat, and if you use Acrobat DC, there aren't the same licensing restrictions as there were with previous versions of Acrobat.

I use InDesign almost exclusively. It allows you to include interactive form fields, but there are a number of bugs and non-standard behavior with the fields when the form is exported to PDF. It's also difficult to update a form if you need edit the fields in Acrobat after exporting from InDesign, which you usually need to do since you can't set all of the field properties and actions in InDesign.

J

Joel-CNVIAuthor

Participating Frequently

Thanks for your replies George.

Personally I prefer designing in LiveCycle but the folks in Adobe Support in India do not know how to make the LiveCycle designed form submit to an email address. They say I must use Reader Extensions. They suggested to use Adobe Acrobat DC so then I went back to use it but ran into the text pagination issues.

I have looked at the tutorials but evidently I am missing something.

I am going to look into designing the documents in good ol Microsoft Word hoping their documents and form fields will look clean after running them through Acrobat DC.

I also considered inDesign but I had read about some buggy problems and that designing forms is clunky since inDesign was not created to design forms.

I think what I really need is to go find a PDF ninja guru on elance or something like that and pay some $ so they can help me figure out which product will be the best for my project. My project is fairly simple. I have been hired by a home health care company to produce their legacy paper forms into digital PDF. Forms need digital signature and be able to submit them with one click from the form to a HIPAA compliant onedrive.

J

Joel-CNVIAuthor

Participating Frequently

I should add that I spoke to Adobe sales a dozen or so times and they do not recommend products. They were kind enough to send me to support in India but those people who I am sure mean well are not trained very well and do not know the products well enough to make any recommendations.

Sign up

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Sign in to Adobe Community

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.