PDF Sages announces Sage Form Tool
Philadelphia, PA, June 14, 2002. PDF Sages, Inc. announces its first
commercial software product the Sage Form Tool. The Sage Form Tool is a
plug-in for Adobe Acrobat 5.0 (and later) for Mac OS and Windows that
delivers new and improved functionality, and greatly increased
productivity, to those authoring and editing Acrobat Forms.
Authored by Leonard Rosenthol and Kas Thomas, two of the most respected
experts in the PDF field today, the Sage Form Tool is the result of months
of customer research to determine what are the most painful limitations of
the built-in Acrobat Form Tool and how to best provide alternatives.
Sage Form Tool is designed first and foremost to be a productivity
multiplier. Experienced Acrobat users know that Acrobat’s native
form-authoring functionality requires that the user spend a long time
navigating a bewilderingly complex Field Properties dialog. With Sage Form
Tool’s easy-to-use unified property pane, the user has immediate, one-click
access to every property that a field possesses (including some that even
Acrobat keeps hidden!). The user can alter any field attribute
interactively (with live preview), without any data loss. By contrast, when
these kinds of manipulations are done using Acrobat’s native tool, the form
field disappears and becomes a blank box with handles.
After choosing a set of properties that you are happy with, you can click
on the “Save” button to store your hard work on your disk as a “properties
template”, which can then be applied to individual or multiple fields with
a single mouse click. These “templates” are simple text files that can
easily be viewed and edited with your choice of tools.
Forms today are becoming more and more interactive. This requires that the
form’s author create JavaScripts that will validate, animate and otherwise
make the fields in the document come to life. Unfortunately, getting to
those scripts with Acrobat’s Form Tool requires quite a bit of
mousing. With the Sage Form Tool, every script in the form is directly
accessible with a single mouse click even the creation of new scripts.
Perhaps the most unintuitive part of editing an Acrobat form is the setting
of the tab order for your fields. Not only is it quite prone to causing
errors, but a single missed click of the mouse and you may have to start
over again. The graphical Set Tab Order dialog in the Sage Form Tool
eliminates all of the hassles by allowing you to set the tab order the way
it should be.
Power users will appreciate one of the Sage Form Tool’s most unusual
features: extensibility. Custom JavaScript can be (but doesn’t have to be)
used to add or modify the plug-in’s features, including menu commands. “I
felt it was extremely important to give the power user the ability to hook
into the plug-in’s core features,” explains Kas Thomas, one of the
plug-in’s authors. “With Acrobat’s newly expanded JavaScript capabilities,
this becomes an especially exciting possibility. You might say we’ve given
the end user the ability to write plug-ins for a plug-in!”
The Sage Form Tool is currently in development and due to ship to customers
in early July for all Macintosh (OS 9 and OS X) and Windows platforms
supported by Acrobat 5.0 and later.
About PDF Sages
PDFSages (http://www.pdfsages.com/) is dedicated to providing unmatched
PDF-oriented consulting and development services. We create solutions that
combine our knowledge of PDFwith other publishing tools to deliver
solutions for both the desktop and server markets for Mac OS, Microsoft
Windows and various Unix-based platforms.
