Archive Evenlogic electronic forms solutions

Our aim is to make form filling a simple task for users whilst ensuring tangible business benefits to the organisations collecting the form data. We achieve this by developing electronic forms solutions that are specifically tailored to the requirements.

Most of our solutions are based on one of two technologies:

• Adobe LiveCycle ES: This is an Adobe enterprise technology and is part of the Adobe Experience Manager solution (AEM). It supports the development and operation of sophisticated dynamic forms and associated backend processes. The forms can be rendered as PDFs on PCs and laptops or as HTML5 on iPads and Android tablets. A simple LiveCycle PDF form that demonstrates the dynamic capabilities can be downloaded from Downloads and tested.

• Acroforms (Acrobat forms): These are traditional PDF forms that can operate on PCs, iPads and Androids. Typically a baseline PDF form is created from an existing legacy form or Word document. Acrobat is then used to create and superimpose fixed data fields, checkboxes, buttons and JavaScript code on to the form thereby turning it into an interactive electronic PDF form. Evenlogic has developed a technology that can optionally operate in conjunction with Acroforms. This includes server-side software (normally operating in a Microsoft .NET environment) that can incorporate a database which can be used to pre-populate designated form fields and process the submitted form data.

The above technologies are described further here. Both support digital signatures.

Though we have considerable experience of providing solutions based on these technologies, we find that two customers seldom have the same requirements; there always seem to be different issues to consider. To share our thoughts on some of these, we have produced two ‘Thinking about’ downloadable ebooklets specifically for PDF forms solutions. These may be downloaded by clicking these links:

• Thinking about developing PDF forms, ebooklet
• Thinking about PDF form submission, ebooklet

It should be noted that these ebooklets were produced during early 2012. Later that year, Adobe released version XI of Acrobat and Adobe Reader and these in turn were superseded in April 2015 by the latest versions of Acrobat, which are referred to collectively as Adobe Acrobat DC. The XI and DC versions of Reader allow form saving on a desktop PC without requiring reader extensions or extended rights to be applied to a form. This applies just to Acroforms though; dynamic PDF forms developed using LiveCycle Designer still require reader extensions or extended rights to be applied to a form in order for the data to be retained when the form is saved on a PC. Please bear this point in mind when reading the ebooklets.

Acrobat Reader DC can be obtained from https://get.adobe.com/uk/reader/.