Steve Tibbett's Interactive Statements

I trust you’re back, and you’ve installed Designer. Welcome back.

If you haven’t got a Form Designer to install, you can find a free Tryout version over here.

All I wanted to mention today is one tip regarding scripting.

Often I fire up Designer to try something out, and today I was having trouble. I added a button to my form, added a text field, and added some script that would run when the button was clicked. But when I previewed the form and clicked the button, nothing happened.

When I saved the form as an XDP file, however, and then previewed and clicked the button, it worked fine.

This was a new computer I was trying this on, and I’d forgotten an important setting. In the Options dialog, the first option on the first page of options is “Default file type for new forms”.

If this is set to the default of “Static PDF Form File”, then your scripts won’t run. If you plan to be doing any scripting in Designer, then set this to “Dynamic PDF Form File”.

The XFA forms that Designer creates don’t work in old versions of Acrobat Reader, which is why this option is off by default. But if you’re developing interactive forms, you’ll probably want your users using a recent version of Reader, and having this option set to static forms by default means whenever you create a new form, none of the scripts you’re writing will work until you actually save it to disk as an XDP file or interactive form.

I’m going to occasionally talk about Adobe’s Form Designer in this blog, because that’s what I work on.

Designer comes with Acrobat Professional, although it’s not installed by default. If you have Acrobat installed, and you don’t have Designer, go dig out your Acrobat disc and install it. I’ll wait here.

There are a significant number of blogs in the world (I’d guess, at least 25% of all blogs created) whose only post is some equivalent of a “Hello, World” post.

So here’s mine. Hi!

Difference is, of course, that I’ll be back.

(But that’s what they all say isn’t it? Stay tuned…)