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Hello. My name is Terry White,
Worldwide Design Evangelist for Adobe Systems.
It's my pleasure to walk you through one of the exciting new features
of InDesign CS6--PDF forms.
Well, we've been doing PDF for a very long time with Acrobat,
but the problem in the design workflow is you design this
great-looking document that you want to turn into a form,
you make it a PDF, but then you have to take it over to Acrobat
and actually lay out all the form fields.
Well, no longer is that the case, because you can now do it
all inside InDesign. Let's take a look.
So I have an InDesign document open here, and as you can see,
I've got some nice design work here.
I've got the names of the fields that I'm going to want.
I've got little squiggly designs that will be the containers of the fields,
but I don't actually have the fields.
And, again, in the past you would pretty much stop here,
do your export, and then go over to Acrobat.
But now we know longer have to do that workflow
because we can just simply grab our text tool, and we can treat this
as if we're going to actually lay out where people will type.
So, for example, I'm just going to create a text frame in this area,
and we'll just go ahead and create another one for the address.
And once I have all the text frames where I'm going to want people to actually
input their data, then I can just simply select them,
head over to my buttons and forms panel.
It used to be just the buttons panel,
but now in CS6 I can select that field or select that object and tell it
that it's actually a text field.
And it will basically be the same kind of thing that I would have to do in Acrobat,
but now I can do it right here in InDesign.
For example, I can say that this is the name field and, by the way,
it's a very good idea to go ahead and name your fields as to what they actually are
because that will help you when you're trying to figure things out when submitting your forms,
where the data is actually coming from.
So I'm going to go ahead and select the address here, same thing.
It's a text field and, by the way, you can see the other field types that are supported
inside PDFs, so we can do check boxes, combo boxes, list boxes that contain
a list of options, radio buttons, and even signature fields.
We're just going to go ahead and make this another text field.
We'll go ahead and put in the word "address."
And now that will be our address field.
Now I've gone ahead because it's the same process for the state,
the ZIP, and the email.
So now let's get down to the "Who Are You?"
So in the "Who Are You?" section, we have the choices for
press, merchant, designer, and fashionista, but the problem is
I only want someone to pick one of those.
Now we have different form types, as we saw.
You could either do a check box or a radio button.
I think a radio button is more appropriate in this case because
with a check box that usually signifies that more than one thing can be checked,
but with a radio button, usually it's one or the other.
Now we can build radio buttons manually, so for example I can just simply drag
out a frame where I want my radio button to be and then just duplicate it.
Or I could even go in and grab from our sample buttons and forms.
And, as you can see, there are single check boxes and single radio buttons
and groups of check boxes and groups of radio buttons.
What this does is it allows me to quickly grab all the sets that I need
complete with their over states and their selected states as needed for buttons.
In this case, we're just going to go ahead and build it manually,
and let's go ahead and just, with that frame selected, we'll switch over
to our selection tool, and now we'll just go ahead and duplicate that.
So I'm going to hold down my Option key on the Mac or my Alt key on Windows,
and we'll just go ahead and shift, drag that over--or drag, shift it over
so that it stays aligned.
All right--and so they all stay the same size as well.
So now we have all four of our radio buttons there.
We're just going to go ahead and select all four of them.
And with all four selected we'll now say that we want to make this a radio button.
The important reason that we did it with all four selected is because
in order for a radio button to work in a PDF form,
the buttons all have to be the same name.
So it not only created all four, but it named them the same--radio button number four.
We're just going to go ahead and call this "Who," and that way
they're all named the same thing.
So if I deselect and reselect any of them, they're all called "Who."
That way it knows it's a group and that they should work together as one set of selections
or one selected set.
Now you'll also notice that when we get down here we have some jumbling
of the type or name here.
When we pull this apart, we can see this is just two frames overlapping.
That's because this is set to be hidden until triggered.
So, in a PDF form, you won't actually see this.
You will actually see one name until it's selected, and then you see another name
because if it's pressed we want it to be publication name
and all the rest of the things that go with that,
and if it's a merchant, we want it to be the store name.
So that's why those were overlapped, so that it will show one or the other.
And this big RSVP that's here--this will also show until something is selected.
And then of course we have the actual submit button.
And, again, this is all wired up here in InDesign with our Mail To,
and we'll just go ahead and change this--terry@mail.com.
Don't worry; that doesn't work, so I hope terry@mail.com doesn't really exist.
Now let's go ahead and head over now--how would we get this out?
File, Export, PDF, as we always do,
and once we make our interactive PDF,
we can then head over to Acrobat and open it up,
and we can begin to fill it out.
So as we can see here, it's the entire InDesign document, graphically rich,
with all the InDesign layout and including our form fields,
which I've already started to fill out, but as you can see, they're fillable
complete with the address, state, ZIP, email address.
And, again, we'll make up an email address,
and once I pick whether I'm Press--I get Publication name and Your title--
or Merchant--I get store name and Your title, depending on which one I choose.
And then lastly, when I'm ready to hit Submit, I hit Submit and the form is emailed
to the person that you designated when you created the Submit button.
So as you can see, InDesign lets you have a complete PDF forms workflow
from designing your document, adding your form fields, adding the interactivity,
exporting the final PDF that's ready to be put on your website
or emailed to people, and they can then begin to fill it out and submit the data back to you.
Thanks again for watching; my name's Terry White.
[Adobe]
