Opinion: It looks like Adobe will continue providing two distinct methods of PDF form creation in Acrobat: using AcroForms and through the stand-alone Designer."What's up with this new LiveCycle Designer?" a developer asked me, I think rhetorically, in an e-mail last week. "Is Adobe trying to KILL it?"
She was referring to the seemingly schizophrenic pricing the Windows-only product has endured since its original release in 2003. Initially, it carried a $1,695 price tag. Then it came free with Acrobat 7 Pro. Now it still comes free with Acrobat Pro, but the new 7.1 upgrade costs $29.
This particular developer earns her meals by enabling businesses to make the forms they need, whether it's via LiveCycle Designer or using the tried-and-true AcroForms method, which predates Designer by several Acrobat revisions and around which a third-party software ecosystem of its own has grown.
She needs to know what direction the market will take so her company will be ready when the next version of Acrobat hits the streets. (If Adobe's past trends hold true, that should be some time in the middle of this year.)
Right now, her company's trying to help its customers make sense of the pros and cons of the two ways of making forms, and—from the tenor of the e-mails she sent me—she's spending a lot of time explaining technical concepts to customers that could be better spent improving those customer's business processes.
If Adobe were to abandon AcroForms altogether, some third-party developers' businesses would go the way of the dodo. Other developers would figure out a way to migrate their current customers to Designer's paradigm of XML schemas and complex features.
Adobe slips powerful PDF features into LiveCycle Designer 7.1. Click here to read more.
The particular developer I'm talking to has heard rumors that Adobe plans to abandon AcroForms in the next version of Acrobat. Her little company isn't too happy about that, either, as her partner puts it: "LiveCycle Designer forms are produced by LiveCycle Designer and they are only forms; none of the other PDF interactive technologies work with LiveCycle Designer forms. Such as multimedia and 3-D."
This developer doesn't want to see AcroForms go away, she said, because, "There are many other types of non-form PDF documents that require form controls (i.e., buttons to navigate documents, start and stop multimedia players, activate or display other types of dynamic info)" and AcroForms is the way to implement those controls.
Last week, I brought up these issues with Adobe's Jeff Stanier, senior product manager, and Alan Tam, product marketing manager.
Now, asking Adobe managers questions about the future is tricky, because corporate policy requires them to say very little or nothing at all, even when confusion and anxiety are coursing through the developer marketplace. It's different elsewhere, such as at Microsoft. We've known for so long that the next Windows is code-named Vista/Longhorn, for example, that when it comes out next year it will seem more familiar than Martin Lawrence in drag.
Stainer and Tam, on the other hand, aren't allowed to admit on the record that Adobe's even working on the new version of Acrobat, let alone confirm or deny whether the company plans to change the names Elements, Standard and Professional to Medium, Large and Biggie Size. Or whether or not the whole Acrobat project under development is, as other rumors have it, code-named Big Momma's House 8.
Stainer did, however, explain that LiveCycle Designer 7.1's pricing was driven by legalities. In a follow-up e-mail to last week's interview, he said Adobe had to charge "a nominal fee" because "accounting rules require that software vendors charge for product releases that contain additional functionality beyond bug fixes.
"Because the LiveCycle Designer 7.1 release contained new features that went beyond bug fixes and simple enhancements, we had adhere to accounting rules and treat it as a separate release, which meant that we had to charge a nominal fee for the software to distinguish it as a new release."
Read details here about how LiveCycle's policy server controls PDF flow.
Tam said Adobe plans to "continue down the current path" for bundling Designer with Acrobat, but at the same time acknowledged that the path might change, especially with the added layer of complexity that Adobe's Macromedia acquisition brings to many of Adobe's plans.
"Don't see the release of 7.1 as a stand-alone product as a departure from the current strategy," Stainer added. Reading between the lines, I'm guessing that Adobe plans to continue bundling Designer with Acrobat Pro at no extra charge, and also that AcroForms won't be going away in the next version of Acrobat.
Looking further down the road, eventually, yes, I'm guessing AcroForms might go away. But not any time soon.
"We're not planning on removing AcroForms," Stainer said. "We certainly recognize there's a base out there of people creating AcroForms who need to edit and change those over time. We do see [Designer] as a better way to make forms, and it has the ability to grow up into an enterprise solution."
Tam acknowledged that AcroForms is a more familiar, more widely adopted method of creating PDF forms, and that Designer is the new kid on the block. He said he hopes that eventually users and developers will migrate to Designer forms.
But for now he points to recent stronger integration of AcroForms into the LiveCycle server systems as evidence of Adobe's commitment to AcroForms and to supporting the systems integrators, consultants and developers who've spent years building businesses around AcroForms-powered plug-ins, scripts and code.
"Designer is a lot easier [to use as a] tool for them to do what they're trying to do," Tam said, ". . . [but] we don't want to just cut off the lifeline. It takes some time for people to transition. For us to just say 'Hey, we no longer support this,' we would be dealing with a lot of disgruntled customers."
Keep in mind, no one has actually stated that there is a new Acrobat release in development, or that it will be called Acrobat 8. So any of the above stuff talking about future plans that isn't between quote marks, that's mostly just me, conjecturing.
And I'd tell you a lot more stuff that I've heard (anyone heard of this Adobe project code-named Apollo?), but I have a date at the local cineplex to go see Martin Lawrence get jiggy.
Don Fluckinger is a freelance writer based in Nashua, N.H., who has covered Acrobat and PDF technologies for PDFzone since 2000.
Document Management 
