I can't find a web page that describes what's new in Designer 7.1 but in the Designer 7.1 help documentation, there's a
What's New topic. You'd have to install the demo version to be able to use the help file so I figured I would just list the content here for your convenience.
Tables
LiveCycle Designer now lets you create tables. A table is made up of rows and columns of cells that can contain form fields or show data. You can quickly create a static or dynamic table using the Table Assistant. Static tables have a fixed number of columns and rows. Dynamic tables have a fixed number of columns but the number of rows in the table will change depending on how much information is in the data source. LiveCycle Designer supports simple, complex, and nested tables.
Language-Specific Features for Arabic, Hebrew, Thai, and Vietnamese
LiveCycle Designer now supports Arabic, Hebrew, Thai, and Vietnamese. The characters in Arabic, Hebrew, Thai, and Vietnamese are context-sensitive, that is, different images are used for the same character depending on its position within a word and some characters are made up of a combination of several characters. These languages are referred to as complex scripts.
Arabic and Hebrew are right-to-left languages. LiveCycle Designer now supports right-to-left or bidirectional text. Bidirectional text occurs when texts of different direction orientation appear together.
Note:
LiveCycle Forms 7.1 does not support form designs that contain Arabic, Hebrew, Thai, and Vietnamese fonts.
New Paper Forms Barcode object
With LiveCycle Designer, you can add two-dimensional (2D) barcodes to interactive PDF forms using the Paper Forms Barcode object. You can then publish the barcoded forms to a website or distribute them by email or CD. When a user fills a barcoded form by using Adobe Reader, Acrobat Professional, or Acrobat Standard, the barcode is updated automatically to encode the user-supplied form data. The user can submit the form electronically, or print it to paper and submit it by mail, fax, or hand. Using LiveCycle Barcoded Forms you can later extract the user-supplied data as part of an automated workflow, routing the data among approval processes and business systems. For example, you can create a LiveCycle workflow by using LiveCycle Workflow to include business processes specific to LiveCycle Barcoded Forms. When integrated with LiveCycle Workflow, a single unified forms process can easily support different paper form submissions, each with their own specific workflow.
The Paper Forms Barcode object in LiveCycle Designer includes the following changes and additions for specifying the settings for capturing and encoding the user-supplier form data:
Symbology In addition to PDF417, LiveCycle Designer now supports barcodes encoded with industry standard QR Code and Data Matrix symbology.
Encode select objects You can select only the required objects to be encoded in a paper forms barcode and save them as a collection.
Dynamic form object properties
LiveCycle Designer now lets you set up dynamic properties for form object properties. This means that you can assign values from a data source to form object properties that LiveCycle Designer updates at run time. For example, the items in a drop-down list can be populated with a list of countries that are stored in a data source.
Dynamic properties allow you to modify form object properties outside of the form design and rely on a data source. This can be useful in deployment and maintenance scenarios. In addition, the same data source can supply data to different form designs. For example, a long list of countries can be stored in one data file and used in many forms. You can use dynamic properties to implement functionality formerly possible only with scripting.
Descriptions in the Hierarchy and Data View palettes
You can now view captions or descriptions of the objects in the Hierarchy and Data View palettes. These provide more information about the objects when you are building a form.
Controlling subform breaks based on data
You can now use conditional breaks to manually specify when and how to manage subform breaks. Conditional breaks allow you to verify data for a field within a repeating subform against previous instances of that field. The repeating subform can then be broken up according to the change in the data supplied to the field, and if required, automatically generate a new page.
Compatibility with version 6
You can use the Compatibility tab in the Form Properties dialog box to update forms that were created in LiveCycle Designer version 6 to version 7. If the older form will be viewed primarily with Acrobat 7.0 or Adobe Reader 7.0 or later, use the Compatibility tab.
Stefan
Adobe Systems