LiveCycle Designer vs. InDesign: pros & cons for creating fillable PDF forms

InDesign can be used for creating the underlying design, but you'd normally use Acrobat or Designer to add the interactive form fields to the PDF you create from InDesign. You can create interactive buttons in InDesign, but not other types of fields.

Whether you choose Acrobat or Designer to create the form depends on your needs. If you provide more details about the purpose of the form and how it will be used, that would be great.

Hi,

I would recommend LC Designer over InDesign for creating forms.

InDesign will give you greater control over the look and feel of the form. However InDesign really only creates the visual appearance of the form. The interaction (textfields, radio buttons, etc) are added in Acrobat. One basic workflow is InDesign for the form layout > Export to PDF > Open PDF in Acrobat > From the Forms menu you can run the forms wizard which will detect fields and generate objects. You can see that this means you are developing in two environments. Any changes have to be made in InDesign and then replace the pages in the PDF form. This workflow is okay for simple/short forms.If using LC Designer, then you can export the InDesign layout as an image file and then place this in LC Designer as a background. You can then overlay this with form objects.

If you start the form from scratch in LC Designer, you will only be working in one environment. LC Designer gives sufficient control over the objects to change visual appearance. Also you can start to add script to change the appearance of the form at runtime, for example showing/hiding objects.

Forms developed in LC Designer are called XFA Forms, which give better flexibility for processing data later. For example importing/exporting XML data, connecting to a database or a web service call.

In LC Designer you can set up a Master Page (or multiple Master Pages) and assign these to particular pages in the form.

There can be a steeper learning curve with LC Designer (particularly with scripting), but there are plenty of resources online and on the forums.

Hope that helps,

Hi George,

That was fast! Thanks for the quick response.

The forms are financial aid forms for the college where I work. Basic information about the student, name, ID number will be gathered. What we want to do is create a master template that can be used for a standard look and feel for all the forms (I think we have six or eight in total that will be converted.)

I've worked with PDF forms for the past couple years, but we haven't standardized the look and feel. This is our chance to "get it right" and hopefully make it easy for us to produce additional PDFs for other college departments.

Once the form is filled out, it will be emailed to the appropriate staff people at the college.

What other information can I provide you?

I'd say either Acrobat or Designer will be fine. If you use XFA, your users will need to use Acrobat or Reader. Acroforms (those created by Acrobat) have much wider support with third-party PDF viewers (Foxit, NitroPDF, Nuance, etc.) If the form needs to be dynamic (e.g., adding fields at runtime, expandable fields), Designer is what you'll want to use. I prefer acroforms due to their simplicity and support of everything PDF has to offer. For dynamic forms, you'll want to do the design work in Designer, not InDesign.

There is a great article by Thom Parker here somewhere that discusses the differences and the reasons you may choose one over the other. Post again if you cannot find it.

An important thing to consider is extracting the data if you'll be dumping the data to a database. Both support exporting data as XML, but the details are different.

Another thing to consider regardless of which way you go is security. Email is generally not a secure means to transmit data, and it looks like your forms may include some sensitive information. Consider setting up the form to submit the data to a secure web server, which either type of form can do.

Thank you George and Niall for your replies and information. I appreciate the time you've taken to help me learn about the options.

Not sure if I was clear, but the choice is between creating the fillable PDF in InDesign or LiveCycle. Some of the decision depends on the ability to style the form elements.

Niall, if I understand correctly, if the form is created in InDesign, the form would have more styling options. Can you be more specific in what you mean? If the InDesign form is exported as XML, does it retain all the styling options?

Niall, a question on your comment about Acroforms having wider support with third-party vendors: is that compared to LiveCycle, InDesign, or both?

Glad you highlighted the flexibility for processing data as a key feature in LiveCycle designed forms. Excellent point.

George, you mentioned "Both support exporting data as XML, but the details are different." Is that for Acrobat vs. LiveCycle Designer? Can you point me to more information?

George, I searched acrobatusers.com this morning, but didn't find Thom's article. Is his article LiveCycle Designer vs. Acrobat, or LiveCycle Designer vs. InDesign? I'm looking for LiveCycle Designer vs. InDesign comparisons.

Good point about submission. Tomorrow I will discuss with the department the various options available.

Here's the URL to the article: http://acrobatusers.com/blogs/thomp/so-what-difference-between-acroforms-and-xfa

To make some clarifications, you cannot create a fillable form in InDesign. You can create the underlying form in InDesign and then use Acrobat to add the form fields to a PDF created by InDesign.

Regarding styling options, what type of things are you thinking about, specifically? I have a differing option about the flexibility of Designer with respect to the look and feel of the form. I think InDesign or some other page layout program is far more flexible, but not for dynamic forms. Still, most forms are relatively simple and either should be OK.

I made the comments about third-party viewer support, and forms created with Acrobat (acroforms) have far more support than LiveCycle Designer (XFA) forms. Whether that's an important advantage depends on your user base. For example, being at a University, you probably have a higher percentage of Mac users, and the default PDF viewer for the majority of Mac users is Preview. Preview does not support all of the interactivity (e.g., JavaScript, submit actions) that you'll probably have, but it is capable of filling in forms, saving, and the user can manually email the form. But the form field contents become not visible due to a bug in Preview that corrupts form fields. The data can still be extracted, however.

George has it covered already - its easier to create a visually richer form in InDesign. You can layer images, colours, transparencies, etc easier in InDesign. You also have more control over the border style of the areas that will be textfields, because in InDesign these are just rectangles or other shapes. When you export from InDesign to PDF, you have a static/flat form that cannot be filled in electronically.

The actual fields/form objects are added in Acrobat, which allows the user to fill in the data into the form.

I've created a few simple interactive pdf forms through InDesign using buttons. This time I want to create a catalog where you can just click on the picture of an item and it will place an X in a box on a black and white form at the end of the booklet. Is there a way to use the bookmarks and/or distinations, and how would I set that up?