PDF Forms with Acrobat 8
Thursday, March 22nd, 2007So I’ve had a bit of a ‘mare with Acrobat 8 recently. The plan was to collect data via an online form but to allow it to be viewable on the original form layout by merging it with a PDF file. I investigated various solutions, mostly commercial products which allowed you to programatically manipulate PDF files until I found this very cool PHP script. It basically creates FDF or XFDF files which can be loaded into a PDF form.
I tried it out a couple of months back before getting side tracked by the Edge Hill Hi site but came back to the code recently. In order for the form data to merge back into the PDF you need to create matching form fields in the PDF and there comes the first problem. At work I have a copy of Acrobat writer but it wasn’t the full version - you could create PDFs not not add forms to them. Rubish. But all is not lost - just in time we got an upgrade to the all-singing, all-dancing Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional! So earlier this week I set about trying to load the FDF (or XFDF) files into my newly created PDF forms.
Could I get it to work? Could I heck! The FDF seemed to be valid, the PDF was valid, the forms seemed fine but try as I might every time I loaded the FDF the PDF would appear with no data in. I tried taking it back to basics and attempting to load the FDF into the PDF while in Acrobat rather than the browser and strangely the import data dialog didn’t have FDF or XFDF listed! After much digging I found a couple of references to why this might be.
It seems that FDF and XFDF are now “old” technology. Forms created with LiveCycle Designer - part of Acrobat Professional - won’t load (X)FDF files. This is anoying for two reasons. Firstly, LiveCycle is actually pretty cool - it automatically detected all my fields when converting from a Word document making creating a form a 5 minute job. Secondly, and considerably more dumb is they’re trying to force users to buy more software! To achieve the same effect as loading an FDF into a PDF you either need:
- Adobe Reader Extensions which costs a lot of money
- Forms Server which costs a lot of money
This is really stupid but kind of what I’d expect from Adobe. The solution is to not use LiveCycle and instead painfully create your form fields manually (which is still a lot easier than the last time I had to do this with Acrobat 4). Anyway, just thought I’d rant about this in case it helps anyone else who’s searching for the solution.