Cleveland InDesign User Group

Meeting Summary: Designing Forms with InDesign and Acrobat

Tue, Mar 10th, 2009 at 6:00 PM

Cleveland Institute of Art, Gund Building

We had 46 members attend our March 10th meeting, "Designing Forms with Adobe InDesign CS4 and Adobe Acrobat Professional 9."

The meeting started off with networking and pizza. Carmen (the Creative Suite 3 Design Premium raffle winner from our January meeting) was nice enough to bring cupcakes for everyone.

Pat Lally started the presentation showing pros and cons of various ways of designing forms using InDesign. Some of the ways that form fields can be created include: the Line tool (the worst way), leader tabs, the underline feature, and tables.

Once the form is complete, the user can export a PDF and use Adobe Acrobat Professional's Form Wizard to add form fields automatically. Pat discussed ways to modify, delete, and add additional form fields as needed.

Using Acrobat's "Distribute Form" feature allows users to send forms via email, or through acrobat.com. Then, after a PDF is distributed, the person distributing the form can automatically keep track of responses. Responses can then be exported to a comma-delimited (CSV) file or an XML file.

We were lucky enough to secure a second laptop and a second projector for this meeting so we could show the Acrobat form feature working in real-time where Pat was able to distribute the form and April received, completed, and submitted the form on the second computer. Finally, Pat was able to view responses in real-time on his computer with the automatically-created PDF responses file.

We will be collecting meeting evaluation forms using the online form for this meeting. All users are welcome to look at the PDF, but please only submit the form if you attended the meeting. The link is below.

Co-chapter representatives, April Clark and Mari Hulick, ended the meeting with the raffle. The last prize, a ladies "Shortcut to Brilliant" CS4 Adobe t-shirt, was thrown into the crowd for one lucky person to catch.

Thank you

Many thanks to Mari Hulick and the Communication Design department at the Cleveland Institute of Art for sponsoring our meetings and providing us with a great meeting space.

Thank you to Layers Magazine for supplying us with the March/April 2009 issue of Layers Magazine for distribution to all meeting attendees.

Thank you to Stock Layouts for providing us with promo cards to receive 50% off any single template and for our raffle prize of a 3-month subscription to www.stocklayouts.com.

Thank you to Wendy Lynch for assisting with registration and raffle sales.

As always, thanks to Adobe for providing the software raffle prizes. This meeting we raffled off Adobe InDesign CS3 and Adobe InCopy CS3.

Comments from attendees

Meeting Evaluation You are invited to complete the online InDesign User Group Meeting Evaluation form for the March 10, 2009 meeting. You can use Adobe Acrobat or Adobe Reader to fill in this form.

When you are finished, click Submit to return your data to the form author.

Meeting Evaluation Form

Next Meeting

Our next meeting topic is still to be determined. The meeting date is Tuesday, May 12th.

If any user has InDesign questions prior to the next meeting, please add them in the discussion area at http://groups.adobe.com/groups/18f96a2c30/summary

Photos from this Meeting