Say Hello to the Form Tools Context Ribbon
As mentioned in earlier posts, the 5.4 release of Nitro PDF Professional was very forms centric. We made some major improvements to form support, and one of these is the Forms Tools context ribbon.
This ribbon appears when you have a form field selected. To see what I’m talking about, add a form field to a document in Nitro Pro (version 5.4 or later of course), and then double click on the form field. The Form Tools context ribbon will now appear.
The goal of the context ribbon is to reduce the amount of time it takes you to add form fields to your document, and set all the properties of the fields. This is why the Form Tools context ribbon contains only the common properties — there are still additional properties that can be found by clicking on the ‘Properties’ button on the end of the context ribbon.
Throughout the rest of this blog post I’ll step you through what each of the items on the Form Tools context ribbon are.
General Panel
This is the first panel, found on the very left of the context ribbon. It provides a way to modify:
- The field name.
- Its visibility properties (whether it’s visible on the page and/or when printed, and whether it’s read-only).
- The field’s rotation property (determines whether the content inside the field is rotated or not).
Appearance Panel
This contains tools to help you set the appearance of the form field(s) you have selected. You can:
- Set the border color of the form field.
- Set the thickness of the form field border.
- Set the fill color.
This already makes life easier for you, compared with how you would do it using Acrobat. But wait, there’s more!
When you have a field selected, and you know that you would reuse the same appearance properties in the future, you can save the current properties as an Appearance profile. You do this by clicking on the little down arrow at the bottom left of the Appearance gallery. (See the screenshot below.)
Then, the next time you want to use that appearance, just select the Edit All Fields tool, double-click on the form field, and then left-click on the appearance you want to use from the Appearance gallery.
Tasks Panel
It’s in the Tasks panel where you’ll find the rest of our form design related productivity tools.
- Make Copies. A dead-simple way of duplicating form fields throughout your document. Select the form field you want to duplicate, click on the Make Copies button and select how many duplicates you want. You can even tell it to duplicate them at the same position on every page in the document.
- Inherit Properties. Provides a way for the selected field to inherit the properties from another form field in the document. Another productivity tool for configuring form field properties.
- Set as Default. Set the default properties for a particular type of form field.
More Panel
There isn’t too much to say here, as clicking the Properties button will just display the Properties dialog for the selected form field. Acrobat users will be very familiar with this dialog, and is where all of the advanced properties can be found.
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