[cw-discuss] Miserable 6.0 experience...

[Bodvar Bjorgvinsson]

On 2/16/07, James E. LaBarre <jamesl at bestweb.net> wrote:
> Bodvar Bjorgvinsson wrote:
>
> Would it be possible to output those PDFs as "fillable forms" though?

Yes, starting with Acrobat 5, I think, this was made possible as a
part of Adobe's "default" software for pdf, but only with add-ons.
Since Acrobat 6, this has been an integrated part of Acrobat
Professional (which does not come cheap, BTW).

In both situations, if you have/had a tool to access or write the
PostScript code into your document, this was also possible. With
FrameMaker you can. And then you have some add-ins from Microtype
(www.microtype.com) that make this even easier.

You can make fillable forms, you can add navigation buttons, you can
(with Microtype add-ins) have your bookmarks colored, bold, italic,
based on paragraph tags (differnt types of headings) and all sorts of
things.

> In my last email I was speaking of 2 situations, one of which would
> warrant using MSWord itself.  When you have to collaborate with others,
> and *have* to have precise formatting (especially in complex documents),
>   that's when you have to use MSWord itself.  My own situation was where
> I had to fill out a form electronically, and the form was so MSW-centric
> that it would probably fail even on older versions of MSOffice..  I can
> tell you, I was not about to hunt down some other version of MSOffice
> just for one document; I filled out whatever was recognizable, then
> printed out and completed the rest by hand.  Here's where a fillable PDF
> form would have worked great.

This is actually one of the worst things with Word: incompatibility
between versions (in spite of what they advertise). A lot of people
share my experience in getting into all sorts of trouble with Word
documents when updating between versions. Even page numbering can get
so bad that you have to start all anew.

Regarding making fillable forms, I have not done many of those, but
there I have either used Word (yes, even me!) or PageMaker, which has
some features that can speed up a creation of a form, and then make
the fill-in parts with Acrobat Professional.
The fields can be read into any database, I am told, but at my
company, we use it only for fill-in and mailing or faxing back.

I know I could make this from within FrameMaker, but as I have not
been doing such forms for years now, I have not tested it. I have been
doing all sorts of handbooks for the last 4-5 years and, boy, what a
difference it makes to use FrameMaker in stead of Word.

A couple of years ago, Adobe were considering cutting the string to
FM, but the technical writing experts usingn FM responded so hard to
the rumour that Adobe started to look into this and guess what, they
found out what a gem they had been hiding from themselves!

If you are working with a CMS, FrameMaker is also one of the software
of choice to use with that and many CMSs can connect directly into FM.

Sorry, I am already taking up too much space here. :-)

Hope this is of some help.

Bodvar