Enabling usage rights for acrobat 7 and below

Hi Abbica,

If the users have Acrobat 5, 6, 7 or above ( the paid for product- not the free Adobe Reader) they will be able to fill out the form without enabling rights added at all. The Reader Enabling Rights are specifically for people who only have the Free Adobe Reader, and when you add those rights in Acrobat 8 Pro they will only work for users with the free Adobe Reader 7 or above.

I'm not sure about the crashing problem- did this colleague have Acrobat OR the free Adobe Reader crash trying to fill in your form?

Hope this helps,

Dimitri
WindJack Solutions
www.pdfscripting.com

Thanks Dimitri, she has Acrobat Pro 5 so that should have worked in theory but you answered my question which is a great help. Going to have to upload the Free Adobe Reader 7 onto the website before people upload the applicaiton forms. Hope I can do that? Just everytime I figure or someone else tell me something, another problem arises.

Can I ask you, I have Acrobat Professional 8, would I be better getting Acrobat Professional 9, because I have to do over 200 application forms, online and fillable? or is Pro 8 ok?

Hi Abbica,

First a question I didn't ask before- are you creating these forms in LiveCycle Designer, or Acrobat? They are two completely separate programs even though they are sold and come in one box. LiveCycle Designer forms were not added until version 7 (if I remember correctly) so if your colleague is trying to open a LiveCycle Designer PDF form in Acrobat 5 that may be what the problem is- I don't think Acrobat 5 or 6 would be able to recognize those because they are built on XML, not traditional Acroforms PDF technology.
I'm sure that is clear as mud, but there is a LOT of confusion between AcroForms and LiveCycle Designer forms to this day, and it is now several years since Adobe added LCD to each box of Acrobat sold.
If you are using LiveCycle Deisgner forms then your end users will have to have Acrobat 7 Standard/ Pro or above, or Adobe Reader version 7 or above for those. If you are using AcroForms created in Acrobat, they should be fine with any version of the full Acrobat and anything above version 7 of the free Reader.

Now having said all that- I see no reason for you to upgrade to Acrobat 9 as far as being able to do most types of fillable forms faster or more efficiently. Acrobat 8 Pro should be fine and Acrobat 9 would gain you nothing in regards to creating most application type forms. The most compelling reason to get 9 is if you want to add multimedia and/or Flash to your PDFs.

Hope this helps,

Dimitri
WindJack Solutions
www.windjack.com
www.pdfscripting.com

Hi thanks for your advice Dimitri, I created the forms in Acrobat Pro 8, using form field recognition so my colleague needs to upgrade to Acrobat 7 for it to work properly.

I might get Acrobat Pro 9 anyway, as I want to get into creating news bulletins and press releases with some animation. Maybe this might cause more restrictions for the end user though?

I have designed three forms in LCD 8 that have a digital signature field. The forms are saved as dynamic 7 forms. I enable usage rights in Adobe Reader before posting the form to Sharepoint. This should mean that any user with Reader 7.0.5 and above can open, fill out, save and email the form. However, two users with 7.0.7 and 7.0.8 respectively get an error message when trying to open the forms.

Does anyone know if 7.0.7 or 7.0.8 have glitches involving digital signatures?
Does anyone know if forms with digital signatures require Reader 8?
Thanks, VC

Could anyone help me to enable the usage rights for a pdf created with LifeCycle Designer? Would like to be able to have anyone using the form, and who only have Acrobat Reader (7 or 8) to be able to save the form once they complete it.