What's new in Adobe LiveCycle Designer ES Update 1

Adobe LiveCycle Designer ES Update 1 is our most recent release of the LiveCycle design tool for creating form and document templates. The Designer ships with Acrobat 9 and with Update 1 of the LiveCycle Enterprise Suite (ES). The numerical version number for this release is 8.2. LiveCycle Designer is an integral part of the LiveCycle Workbench ES design environment.

The following is a summary of what's new in LiveCycle Designer ES Update 1.

Tab Order Authoring

We have completely revamped the user interface for creating tab order in the Designer to make it easier and faster for you to view and change tabbing order in a form design. The new Tab Order palette displays a numbered list of all the objects on the form, where each number represents the position of the object within the tabbing order. You can quickly set automatic or custom tab orders, move individual fields or blocks of fields within the order. It's now possible to display tab order for all form objects, for accessibility purposes, or just the form fields. Visual aids also allow you to see the forms' tabbing order on the design canvas.

Typographical Controls

You now have more control over the formatting of text within your form. Typographical controls such as pair kerning, horizontal and vertical font scaling, letter spacing adjustments and leaders provide the ability to create more visual appealing forms and documents and meet with exacting layout requirements.

Hyperlinks

Add hyperlinks to the text in static text objects and object captions, which link to external PDF or HTML documents. You can also enable form fields so that users can apply hyperlinks to data within Reader 9.

Hyphenation

Hyphenation options provide a more appealing visual flow by automatically adding hyphens line breaks in paragraphs. Form fields and static text objects can be hyphenated. Hyphenation in interactive form fields requires Acrobat or Reader 9.

Page Breaking

You now have additional control over the breaking of form fields and text across pages. Static text objects can now break across pages. Widow and orphan control prevents single lines from being separated from the rest of the paragraph text. Keep with next control keeps objects like titles on the same page as the paragraph text that goes with them.

Web Service Authentication

LiveCycle Designer , Reader and LiveCycle Forms and Output services now connects to web services that require transport level (HTTP/HTTPS) or message-level (SOAP) authentication. Basic, Digest and Certificate based authentication are supported for HTTP/HTTPS and Basic authentication is supported for message-level services.

Import Filters

The import Microsoft Word 2007 Document files is now supported. Script conversion for of pre-canned Acrobat forms also enhanced.

Improved Form Distribution

If you start the form design process in Acrobat, you no longer need to add an email submit button to a form design to distribute the form. When you close the form design, Designer ES automatically prompts you about distributing the form.

Guide Builder

In the LiveCycle ES release we introduced the ability to create Form Guides in conjunction with LiveCycle Forms. Form Guides provide a Flex-based wizard-style to a PDF form. Complex forms can be simplified with a step-by-step "guided" data capture experience. Form Guides are authoring inside of LiveCycle Designer using the Guilder Builder tool. Authoring of Form Guides has been improved with the following enhancements

• A real-time panel preview which lets you see the layout of your Form Guide panel as you author it.
• A faster full Form Guide preview with or without the PDF view of the form.
• Additional ad updated Form Guide layouts, navigation and help
• Dynamic Charting
• Easier update of bound objects
• Improved accessibility for the Form Guide runtime (tabbing and screen reader announcement)

We're sure you'll find the improvements we have made in Update 1 will help you create powerful form and dynamic document experience quickly and easily. Enjoy!