Derrick
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- Joined
- Nov 22, 2010
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Adobe seems to be out to prove that anyone can develop his or her own good-looking, portable software in a relatively short amount of time. While the package is certainly on the pricey side, and it’s no mystery that a number of development platforms for other languages are available for less, few can compare in terms of accessibility and the all-important portability that Acrobat Pro Extended offers.
There comes a time in every computer user’s life where they have to sit up and pay attention to the world of changing technology around them. For every hardened gamer who upgrades monthly, I’d say there are at least ten computer users whose latest software installation is Office 2000.
Defying the laws of outdated PCs and managing to slip between the cracks of perpetual software updates, regardless of user classification, is Adobe’s legendary PDF - Portable Document Format. Sure, you know all about PDFs and how they’re (mostly) read-only documents that are tiny, offer brilliant compression and work across multiple platforms, but I can almost guarantee that anyone who takes a few days to look at this latest version of Acrobat Pro Extended will find much more than they bargained for.
At the software’s heart lies the humble PDF printer. This virtual device can turn any printable document into a PDF – including Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, pictures or even Websites – which is especially handy for keeping digital printouts of EFT payments. In addition to a large variety of compression and print settings (customisable or selectable from a set of predefined classes), documents can also be encrypted and password protected to provide an extra layer of security should you wish to publish any valuable information.
Of course, you’re not paying this price for a simple PDF printer, and this is where Adobe’s powerful but surprisingly simple LiveCycle Designer comes into play. If you’ve ever wondered just how versatile the PDF format is, LiveCycle is the answer. By allowing users to design, build and distribute interactive forms and presentations, LiveCycle brings customer management, invoicing and stock control systems or even employee management to the end user without the need for consulting a high-end (and over-priced) software development firm. How it does this is simple: it gives users a straightforward WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) interface to build the frontend and a powerful backend that allows for scripting and database connectivity.
By combining an application such as Microsoft Access with LiveCycle, a user could build an entire stock management system from scratch, print out invoices, make quotes and best of all, e-mail those quotes to their customers. Using the freely available Acrobat Reader, the customer could then tick off what they want and e-mail back the XML information (this is all handled automatically up to the point of clicking ‘send’) for the user to then compile into whatever format they choose.
Adobe seems to be out to prove that anyone can develop his or her own good-looking, portable software in a relatively short amount of time. While the package is certainly on the pricey side, and it’s no mystery that a number of development platforms for other languages are available for less, few can compare in terms of accessibility and the all-important portability that Acrobat Pro Extended offers. A word of warning, however: if you’re just on the lookout for a tool to design, print and edit PDF documents, you’ll be better off looking at Acrobat Pro or just Acrobat.
There comes a time in every computer user’s life where they have to sit up and pay attention to the world of changing technology around them. For every hardened gamer who upgrades monthly, I’d say there are at least ten computer users whose latest software installation is Office 2000.
Defying the laws of outdated PCs and managing to slip between the cracks of perpetual software updates, regardless of user classification, is Adobe’s legendary PDF - Portable Document Format. Sure, you know all about PDFs and how they’re (mostly) read-only documents that are tiny, offer brilliant compression and work across multiple platforms, but I can almost guarantee that anyone who takes a few days to look at this latest version of Acrobat Pro Extended will find much more than they bargained for.
At the software’s heart lies the humble PDF printer. This virtual device can turn any printable document into a PDF – including Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, pictures or even Websites – which is especially handy for keeping digital printouts of EFT payments. In addition to a large variety of compression and print settings (customisable or selectable from a set of predefined classes), documents can also be encrypted and password protected to provide an extra layer of security should you wish to publish any valuable information.
Of course, you’re not paying this price for a simple PDF printer, and this is where Adobe’s powerful but surprisingly simple LiveCycle Designer comes into play. If you’ve ever wondered just how versatile the PDF format is, LiveCycle is the answer. By allowing users to design, build and distribute interactive forms and presentations, LiveCycle brings customer management, invoicing and stock control systems or even employee management to the end user without the need for consulting a high-end (and over-priced) software development firm. How it does this is simple: it gives users a straightforward WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) interface to build the frontend and a powerful backend that allows for scripting and database connectivity.
By combining an application such as Microsoft Access with LiveCycle, a user could build an entire stock management system from scratch, print out invoices, make quotes and best of all, e-mail those quotes to their customers. Using the freely available Acrobat Reader, the customer could then tick off what they want and e-mail back the XML information (this is all handled automatically up to the point of clicking ‘send’) for the user to then compile into whatever format they choose.
Adobe seems to be out to prove that anyone can develop his or her own good-looking, portable software in a relatively short amount of time. While the package is certainly on the pricey side, and it’s no mystery that a number of development platforms for other languages are available for less, few can compare in terms of accessibility and the all-important portability that Acrobat Pro Extended offers. A word of warning, however: if you’re just on the lookout for a tool to design, print and edit PDF documents, you’ll be better off looking at Acrobat Pro or just Acrobat.