Subtitles of the Movie

Alright now, I know I just said I was about to head into LiveCycle Designer but you know, we've got to compare Acrobat Professional and LiveCycle Designer. Which program do we want to use to create our PDF-based forms. So, let's just take a quick second and talk about some ideas here. Now, first of all, the top list is what you can do inside Acrobat and inside LiveCycle Designer and then once we talk about that, the second list down toward the bottom there, talk about how Acrobat and LiveCycle are different. So, let's talk about how they're similar, first of all. So in either program, using either program, you can use a scanned paper document or an electronic document as the foundation, as the basis for your form. So both programs will let you do that. You can edit a PDF-based form that was created inside Acrobat in either program. So if you create a PDF-based form in Acrobat you can edit it in Acrobat. If you create a PDF-based form in Acrobat you can also edit it inside LiveCycle. But something important to note is that once a file is open inside LiveCycle Designer, once a form is opened inside LiveCycle Designer it's almost like it becomes a LiveCycle Designer file, even though it's still a PDF file. So, once LiveCycle touches it now you cannot edit back in Acrobat. You'll see how to edit forms a little bit later on; a little bit later on we'll talk about some of these ideas. And then finally, using both programs you can create forms that can be distributed via E-mail or the Web that would be completed inside Acrobat Reader or filled out by hand. OK, so that's what the two programs have in common. Here's how the two programs are different. First of all, LiveCycle provides a set of Templates to help you get started with your forms, and we'll take a look at these templates in just a moment. The other thing that I should mention as well is that you can use Acrobat or LiveCycle to create a form that calculates fields, so if you want to add values together or multiply sales tax, this sort of thing, you can do it in either program, but Acrobat's field calculation is very simple. It's point and click, it's really easy, whereas LiveCycle uses a code-based system so it's a little bit more tricky, a little bit more involved. Also, Acrobat doesn't really provide a very good set of design tools and your formatting options for your fields are very, very limited, whereas inside LiveCycle Designer, as you'll see as we work our way through our form, you'll see that LiveCycle provides all kinds of formatting and design tools and it's really, really easy to work with. Finally, Acrobat exports its form data usually in the FDF file format, whereas LiveCycle Designer exports its form data as XML, so you may want to think about that as well. Alright, so there are a few things to think about when deciding where you want to build your form and of course we're going to be building our form inside LiveCycle Designer, so let's go a fire it up and we'll take a look at the Interface.