You Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Adobe….

….when you’ve got OpenOffice!

Thanks to Solveig Haugland’s demo on forms during our OpenOffice week at the Howard County Library (last week) I’ve now made my first interactive PDF using just OpenOffice Writer. Oh how I wish Solveig had come a week earlier as I had been fighting with an old PDF that I was converting to interactive using a trial version of full blown Adobe Acrobat 8. But now I find out I could have just done it from scratch using OpenOffice Writer.

It couldn’t have been simpler. Adding text boxes (they lined up beautifully without effort), assigning the font style and size, and tab ordering were a pleasure. Actually Writer was easier than the Adobe LiveCycle when it came to adding the tab order. One of the most frustrating things with Adobe was if I changed my mind about the tab order after I had already started it I was sunk. Especially since it seem to assign tab order to things that weren’t text or check boxes. From now on if I need to make a form (thinking I’ll redo the one that gave me such grief) I’ll be using OpenOffice Writer. So keep your Adobe just give me my OpenOffice.