www.nickhodge.com

As I am no longer “inside the Adobe-loop”, I found out about the announce­ment cour­tesy of Robert Scoble’s post. Of all people!

My first ques­tion: where is the beta of the Reader? With Acrobat 7.0, the beta Reader shipped very close to the announce. Also, Intel Mac users; I am assum­ing its Uni­ver­sal bin­ary, as the sys­tem require­ments clearly men­tion “Intel” pro­cessors. There are still too many Windows-only fea­tures for a den­izen and poster-child for cross-platformness (read Forms Designer).

OK, onto the good stuff. Forms are the bane of everyone’s exist­ence. Even law­yers.

Every paper form that I have to fill out I cringe. Pur­posely, I filled in the last Census online.

All forms should be online/digital/electronic.

They should be smart, and know who I am. There have been some attempts at get­ting browsers to remem­ber data.

They don’t have to match prin­ted forms; if a phys­ical (or wet) sig­na­ture is required: I should be able to just print + sign. Smarter forms will let me fill in online and sub­mit online or via email. Securely.

Adobe Acrobat 8.0 Pro­fes­sional:

Enable advanced fea­tures in Adobe Reader

Enable any­one using free Adobe Reader soft­ware to par­ti­cip­ate in doc­u­ment reviews, fill and save elec­tronic forms off­line, and digit­ally sign documents.

If you are small organ­isa­tion, and just want to col­lect data quickly, it looks like Acrobat 8 (Pro­fes­sional) is going to help out. The Data­sheet has a foot­note “For ad-hoc forms dis­tri­bu­tion and data col­lec­tion for up to 500 people”

One of the most frus­trat­ing, and there­fore com­men­ted on miss­ing abil­it­ies has been for people to be able send out forms, and have any­one with the free Reader fill it in, and send it back. Pre­vi­ously, the only mech­an­ism has been to pur­chase a big block of code called “Adobe Live­Cycle Reader Exten­sion Server”

This lead to all sort of hocus-pocus Javas­cript lib­rar­ies, and server-hackeries. Thank­fully, soft­ware is mak­ing it sim­pler. Like it should be.

I note with interest that guys at PlanetPDF.com in Mel­bourne has missed this one as at 6:30pm AEST.

Adobe Acrobat Reader and Forms Data without Cus­tom CGI. This has been in pro­gress for a while — so its good to get this tech­nique published.