If you’ve read Richard’s post regarding the release of Nitro PDF Professional 5.4, then you’re probably already aware of the update to Nitro Pro’s forms functionality. Calling it an ‘update’ though, doesn’t really do it justice. We have totally rebuilt forms from scratch and it is much different and improved compared with previous versions. If you’re currently developing forms with Nitro Pro, this is a must download to grab right now!
Over the coming few months I’m going to post short articles on new form related features from the 5.4 release. Today’s article is a general overview of what the forms update in 5.4 consists of.
1. Integration with the main application
In versions of Nitro Pro before 5.4, all forms-related work was done inside the Form Assistant, a mode of Nitro Pro that was ‘forms aware’ (even though the main application was not).
Form Assistant has been laid to rest, and now you can fill in and design PDF forms directly from the main Nitro Pro application window. Below you can see the shiny new Forms ribbon (click on the image to expand the view).
2. New form design tools
I’m definitely one to admit that designing forms in pre-5.4 versions of Nitro Pro wasn’t the easiest task to accomplish.
Common tasks such as setting the tab order and calculation order of form fields, to setting the properties or duplicating form fields are much easier and faster to do in 5.4.
In Adobe Acrobat, if you double click on a form field when in design mode you were usually presented with a Properties dialog. What we’ve done in 5.4 is made use of the ribbon user interface, and we now display a context ribbon when you double click on a field in design mode. If you want to view the Properties dialog, you can click on the Properties button at the end of the context ribbon, right click on the form field and select Properties, or set your preferences so that double clicking on a form field opens the Properties dialog (which can be handy and more familiar if you’ve used Acrobat in the past for form designing).
3. Better JavaScript tools, more support
All of the JavaScript tools that were in 5.3.3 and earlier versions can be found again in 5.4, via the Forms ribbon. However, we’ve added some new tools and enhancements in this release, which are listed below:
- Set Document Actions (run JavaScript when the document prints, is saved or is closed).
- Folder Level JavaScript button (opens to the directory that Nitro Pro parses for .js files on initialization).
- New JavaScript console that displays line numbers.
- Support for a much greater subset of the Acrobat JavaScript Reference than before.
That’s the new forms support in a nutshell. Stay tuned for coming posts where we delve into some individual form features and offer tips on designing dynamic forms.
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