Dynamic PDF's for Mobile Devices

[Former Community Member]

I have been converting my company's forms to dynamic pdf format using ES4 to facilitate completion and submission by our highly dispersed workforce.  These forms are unfortunately not accessible on the mobile devices our field employees typically use.  Can anyone suggest resources that a layman can use to learn about and utilize ES4's mobile forms and HTML5 capabilities?  All the information I have located on the Adobe website appears to be oriented to programmers or developers, and my (small) company does not have the financial resources to engage a consultant for this purpose.  Thanks in advance for your insights and suggestions.

[SI_MSD7]

Hi,

In short, what you're attempting to do can be very costly if you stick with the Adobe LiveCycle ES solution to render forms on mobile devices (via their mobile forms platform). Also, if you're not familiar with the technology, you'd definitely need  to engage a consultant in addition to purchasing the require server-side modules to render your forms in HTML5?

Questions:

1. What mobile devices are being used in the field?

2. Do your forms absolutely need to be made dynamic, or could they be saved as "static" XFA, instead? If you're doing things like adding rows to tables, hiding/revealing subforms, etc. then yes, the forms would need be dynamic. But if your forms do not need to be dynamic and/or you can tweak the design logic so the form is rendered in a static layout, then using the forms on an iPad is possible via the app "PDF Expert". PDF Expert can read/render static XFA files HOWEVER there's no support for javascript in that format. On the Android side, the app "qPDF Notes" provides support for static XFA PDFs.

On the other hand...if users are able to use a Windows PRO based tablet (i.e. something like the Surface Pro 2, or even something less expensive running Windows PRO - not RT), then you could install Adobe Reader or Acrobat and use the dynamic forms, as is, on those tablet...no need for HTML5 rendering.

In either case, the solutions mentioned about would be far less expensive (and less complicated) to trying to using ES4 mobile forms.

Hope this helps!

[Former Community Member]

I created a dynamic pdf via LiveCycle just a few months back as a test for a project I was creating......this was for and Android device and it worked with Adobe Reader. We moved forward with the project and the company purchased 5 Sony Xperia Tablet Z's, I've loaded Adobe Reader on them and now, the pdf doesn't work. Previously, it would open and be identical the desktop version; I could tap inside the field and it would open the keyboard function, or I could click on the custom drop downs and select items. Now, it might as well be a piece of paper that you have to fill out. None of the fields work and if you select the "text" function, it opens a box that you type your info in and it just throws it onto the pdf, and not inside the text field. It doesn't even allow me to save the pdf as a new document. The only thing I can see is that there was an update that rendered the LiveCycle forms useless.