THE DESIGNER ENVIRONMENT (WINDOWS ONLY)

If you're new to Adobe Designer you'll love it. You can open a Word document and use Designer to turn it into an electronic form. With Designer you can add interactive elements such as radio buttons, text fields, check boxes, and moreeven bar codes in 32 different formats. All it takes is a simple drag-and-drop from the Library palette, and the Object palette offers a wide array of customization options. Adding colors, adjusting borders, rotating text fieldsit's all done with just a few clicks and drags of the mouse. Viewers can use the Adobe Acrobat Reader to fill in the form and then submit it to a preset email address by hitting a simple button embedded in the form itself. Or they can print it for faxing or mailing. If you prefer, you can create new forms from scratch. Designer comes with more than 20 predesigned templates to choose. Or you can open an existing PDF and add form elements to it. You can also add pizzazz to your existing forms by importing images in a variety of popular formats.

Whichever way you want to use it, Designer is a delight to work with. After your form has been created, you can save it as a static or dynamic electronic PDF form file or as an XML file. And if you need to make continuous changes to the same form you can save it as a Designer template.

While you work on Designer, the Layout palette helps you position your objects precisely within the form, and the Hierarchy palette helps you keep track of all your objects. There is also a grid that can be turned on and off with one simple toolbar click.

Because Designer is a relatively new addition (it was previously available only as a standalone program) Adobe has included a very comprehensive How To palette that will have you zooming forms in no time (see Figure 41.8).

Figure 41.8. With Designer you can create forms from scratch using its comprehensive set of tools.

In the next few chapters you get your hands wet with Acrobat and PDF creation. If you're new to the Creative Suite you'll soon find that Acrobat gives you all the power you need to proof your work and to ensure that it is printed the way you intended it. If you are already familiar with Acrobat, you will appreciate all the new features and enhancements.