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Expanding-objects-in-flowed-subforms - settings greyed-out

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Former Community Member

Windows 7 Ultimate

Acrobat 9 Pro Extended

Adobe LiveCycle Designer ES 8.2

Firstly, I'm very new to using LiveCycle & only slightly more experienced with Acrobat, so I'm unsure about the terminology. Feel fre to correct me on that, even if you don’t have a solution to my main question.

I have an existing interactive (it has fillable text fields, check boxes, etc) pdf form which I want to change so that the text fields expand when full, going across page breaks.

I know it’s possible - I've seen this example from Assuredynamics & when I open it in LiveCycle I can see the settings used, but when I open my form, some of the settings are greyed out.

Object palette>field tab: ‘keep with next’ & ‘allow page breaks within content’ are both greyed out - the second of those is checked in the Assuredynamics & seems like it would be very relevant to what I want to do.

Layout palette>size & position>Y> ‘expand to fit’ isn’t checked in mine but is in the Assuredynamics file. I’ve tried checking it in mine but  it didn’t seem to un-grey-out the other settings.

I'm not even sure exactly what questions I need to ask here, so any comments or suggestions on how to resolve this, without having to totally create the form anew, would be much appreciated!

Thanks in advance

5 Replies

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Level 10

Hi,

For dynamic behaviour to work in LC Designer forms, you need to save the form as a Dynamic XML Form in the save-as dialog:

LC SaveAs Dialog.png

The other issue is how you created the form in the first place. For example if you created the form by importing an existing Word or PDF document, then it is likely that you will not be able to have any dynamic behaviour in the form.

Maybe if you share your form, by uploading to a file sharing site and posting the published URL here.

Niall

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Former Community Member

Hi,

I didn't actually create the file in the first place. When I took over working on it, it was already a static pdf & I think it had probably been converted from a doc or docx file. Maybe it would be simpler to just create anew, modelling from the form I've got...............

I've tried opening both the static & interactive versions in LiveCycle, but can’t figure out how to achieve what I want.

Are there any particular file sharing sites anyone would recommend?

Thanks

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Level 10

Hi,

If you want dynamic behaviour, then I would recommend that you start a new form directly in LC Designer.

You will then be able to save the form as a Dynamic XML Form, as shown above.

You could upload your form to Acrobat.com. Just make sure you publish it fully and then post the published link here.

Acrobat.com publish.png

Niall

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Former Community Member

Hi Niall/anyone else,

I've done as you suggested & published the form on Acrobat.com. There're four versions:

  1. the original static pdf - https://acrobat.com/#d=*E-ewOIMKBBU8ngaAcdEFQ
  2. the above, opened in LC & saved as xdp (save as Dynamic XML Form wasn't an available option) - https://acrobat.com/#d=CGy0o3sOalSfc-ya2wczGw
  3. one that I converted from static to interactive in Acrobat 9 Pro Extended - https://acrobat.com/#d=NN8ifvzzYoKd34EQZtEpRA
  4. that one also opened in LC & saved as Dynamic XML Form - https://acrobat.com/#d=tLCt2Y14BmSWgeMHgjqFeA

I suspect that, in the long run, it'll probably be simpler to recreate the form from scratch, modelling from the form I've got. I'll probably learn more about LC that way too. But, it'd be good to go back to my manager with a properly functioning form soon, so if anyone sees something obvious in my files that I can change then that'll do as a quick solution, for the moment!

Thanks

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Level 1

i can 100% vouch for not importing word or older PDFs into livecycle. It takes so much pain to fix broken objects rather than create them yourself to begin with. I'm also trying to make my subforms expand to size but have been unable to figure it out so far.