"Creating PDF Forms"

By Rowan Hanna
PDF Store Support Team
Issue 26 for 2005

Released with Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Professional, the dedicated form creation tool Adobe LiveCycle Designer allows the creation of interactive forms. The traditional method of creating PDF forms, however, is to lay them out in a word processing application such as MS Word -- in essence, designing a paper form without printing it. With that in mind, it's also possible to use a scanned paper form as the presentation layer if the electronic original is unavailable to you. In either case, you'll need to convert the resulting file in to PDF using Acrobat or a third-party creation tool such as Jaws PDF Creator.

Once you have established the "look and feel" of your PDF form, you can then use Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Professional or a third-party application such as Nitro PDF Professional to add the form fields. Fields are highly configurable, and support radio buttons, lists, barcodes, and many other data types. It's even possible to preset field appearance properties like fonts using ARTS PDF Variform Lite. Once you're satisfied with the style and placement of the form fields, you're done! Welcome to the wonderful world of PDF forms!