Tucked away among December's layoffs, record profits, closure of the Macromedia acquisition and momentous management changes, Adobe released LiveCycle Designer 7.1 with table support and increased 2-D bar-code languages.Amid layoffs, record profits, closure of the Macromedia acquisition and momentous management changes, Adobe Systems Inc. in December quietly released LiveCycle Designer 7.1.
The company typically doesn't announce "point" releases of products in between major upgrades. The latest version of LiveCycle became available in mid-December, according to one developer familiar with the software.
LiveCycle Designer 7.0 comes bundled for free with the Windows version of Acrobat 7 Professional. For legal reasons, said senior Adobe product manager Jeff Stanier, Adobe has to charge a nominal fee—in this case $29—for the 7.1 upgrade.
It's also available as a standalone app for $349 for those who might need copies independent of Acrobat Pro. That number will likely be very small; product marketing manager Alan Tam points out that Adobe customers who purchase LiveCycle forms servers typically have the cost of the software built into their maintenance and support contracts.
"We had some features that we wanted to get into Designer for LiveCycle forms, and we also have some OEM customers that wanted some features," Stanier said. "Shortly, we'll be doing a release that goes along with [LiveCycle Designer 7.1] for printing directly from the server—so you can print to PCL, PostScript and VPL, a label-printer language."
Table support also makes its debut in LiveCycle Designer 7.1. It's implemented as a table object in Designer's menu that can be dragged into a form.
"You can do a layout of quite complex tables. They can be nested with objects within the cells," Stanier said. "This can all be data-driven, so that you dynamically lay out this table much the way we do subforms now."
Other features making their debut in 7.1 include:
- Support for Arabic, Hebrew, Thai and Vietnamese character sets. (Not to be confused with localized versions—LiveCycle Designer isn't available in those languages, but people now can make forms for audiences who read those characters)
- Increased support for two-dimensional bar codes in this version of Designer to include QR Code and Data Matrix symbologies—bar-code standards—common to Japan and Europe in addition to the previously supported PDF417, the predominantly North American standard
- Dynamic Form Objects, which makes drop-down menus and other objects more customizable
- Usability improvements that include more detailed views of the form that show things such as tags
- Customized keystrokes for repeated tasks
Getting away from paper and porting forms to electronic formats is the whole point behind PDF forms and Adobe's LiveCycle server line. Yet, Stanier conceded, not every workplace can bid adieu to pulp; many must maintain paper repositories of their forms. That's the logic behind the PCL printer language output features Adobe is building into Designer and the forms servers that go with it.
"Print is really another output [such as PDF and HTML]," Stanier said, adding that despite Adobe's best efforts to keep PDF forms workflows all electronic, "there are business workflows where it ends up on paper."
LiveCycle Designer, an application separate from Acrobat that integrates XML, is one of two ways people can create PDF forms with Adobe software. Adobe is touting Designer as the best way to do PDF forms, but at this time the company also plans to continue support for the older AcroForm method. That method—with which Acrobat users are more familiar—allows users to create forms within Acrobat by adding form fields to static PDFs.
Explaining the differences to customers can sometimes be challenging, Stanier said.
"Anyone that's used to the AcroForm way may not see the need to do schema binding; they may not be into Web services and those types of things," he added. "For some, an AcroForm does what they want and it's hard to get them to understand the value of [LiveCycle Designer] because they don't have all of those needs."
Adobe offers a trial version of LiveCycle Designer 7.1 for download.
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