Acrobat newbie here although I have v9 and some skills and want to work slowly toward developing a product using .pdfs. Kinda general questions so I hope I picked the correct forum. It's okay to move it if not. Thanks.
So, I know there is an Acrobat SDK and I know there is a LiveCycle SDK.
Aside from the name, Designer seems more closely associated with Acrobat than with LiveCyle. On the surface it seems what I want to do would be easier to develop in Designer than Acrobat so is there a Designer SDK?
If no, assuming that my goal is (mostly) simply designing forms with fields and output is simply .pdfs, is Acrobat SDK what I should be researching and not LiveCycle SDK?
I know that's not much info to go on but I'm just after simple answers for now.
Also:
I have been fascinated by LiveCycle since I learned about the power of Designer but I have not yet succeeded in figuring out exactly what LiveCycle does and how Designer fits in the LiveCycle family rather than the Acrobat family. Can anybody help me out here?
Thanks in advance,
Rick
LiveCycle ES is a product line of which LiveCycle Designer is one element. The many other elements in the product line are server applications, not desktop apps. LiveCycle Designer is a desktop application for designing forms, and only forms. Adobe decided to add the LiveCycle Designer application to every box of Acrobat sold a few years ago. But, they are two separate software applications and the PDF forms created by each one ( you can create forms in Acrobat without LiveCycle Designer, depending on the requirements for your forms) are not interchangeable, i.e., you cannot go back and forth with PDFs created in one application and manipulate the PDF with the other. You choose which one you want to use and then pretty much must stick with it, or experience significant pain.
Since LiveCycle Designer creates forms and then packages them up as PDFs, it is a constant source of confusion for many people who think a PDF is a PDF is a PDF. The confusion was increased by the hooks Adobe added in Acrobat to automatically launch another program (Designer) when you use the Create new Form menu item in Acrobat.
As to the documentation- LiveCycle Designer does not have an SDK like Acrobat does. Acrobat's SDK helps independent developers to develop third party apps that work with and extend Acrobat's functionality. No such openess exists with LiveCycle Designer- it is proprietary in that regard. All of the official Adboe documentation for the LiveCycle product line can be found at-
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/livecycle/9.0/lc_doclist.php
Oh, and you have found an excellent resource here- there are articles, tutorials, blogs etc discussing the difference between the two apps and why you would choose each one for different projects. Quite a few good on-demand video e-seminars on using the two products too.
Hope this helps,
Dimitri
WindJack Solutions
www.pdfscripting.com
www.windjack.com
Dimitri Munkirs
WindJack Solutions
pdfscripting.com