Tech Forum

For the past 2 months I've been making designs for language class posters, baptismal invitations, baptismal programs, stop smoking posters, piano posters. All sorts of things that we as missionaries use.

I'll be leaving the mission office soon though, and therefore I have a desire to let the office have as smooth a transition where they don't need me anymore, but can use these new design, but just insert new names.

I've made all my work in Photoshop, so they won't be able to figure that out.

and here is my question, I've seen that the church, and other places, have made PDF files that are editable. And I would like to know if anyone here knows how to do that, so all the mission would have to do is change the phone nummer for the elders in the city they are in.

So I won't have to make 21 different posters for 21 different cities.

Any suggestions?

I know the open-source program Scribus
can make fillable pdfs. It can't save the
data, however, like the IRS tax pdfs, so all
the data entry must be done immediately
before printing. I haven't checked up on the
project for a year or so, but it might be available
on Windows now.

- Atticus Ewig

Adobe Acrobat 9.0 allows you to create savable forms that can be saved locally using Adobe Reader 9.0. Of course, this assumes you have the funds to purchase Acrobat 9.0.

http://www.adobe.com/products/reader/faq/

You may have to have the right extensions ($) to save anything with just the Reader.

I have Acrobat 7 at home - and have successfully made a Sacrament Programme - with form fields in it for parts of the text that need to be editable - so that anyone else can just type the information in that they need. It's really not that hard...

Unfortunately, unless you're paying for more than a pdf reader, most forms are going to be "fill-and-print."

I've had really good luck creating forms using OpenOffice.org. Both the "Writer" and "Calc" components allow you to insert form controls that retain their fill-in nature when exported to pdf. It takes a little practice if you want a really polished look, but it's worth a shot - plus it's software the church doesn't mind installing on its computers.

- Stephen

Paying for Acrobat is a waste of Church money when you can create the same agendas, invitations, posters, etc. for FREE with OpenOffice or WordPad. All new Church computers come with OpenOffice installed and WordPad is installed by default with Windows. If you don't already have OpenOffice installed, the Church will allow you to install it - usually through a Stake Computer Specialist. Unless you and everyone who sees your invitations is an experienced graphic designer, no one will be able to tell the difference which program you used.

It shouldn't take you more than a day to make templates of the most frequently used documents you've created in the past for the Mission Office to use once you've been transferred/released.

the problem as I see is that he's already made the templates in Photoshop - and so is limited as to what software this can be converted to. If you already have Photoshop, chances are you already have Acrobat. That being the case - Form Fields are the obvious solution.

Foxit Software makes a decent product for a decent price. Check it out at http://www.foxitsoftware.com/products/. Generally a year subscription is less than $50 per year. You can use their editor for free but it puts watermarks on it. In general the idea behind PDFs was to make a file that could not be editable. This will at least allow you to make changes.

Could you post a file to show us what kind of things you are wanting to do? That will help in determining the right package for you. Thanks!

Google Docs has a forms function now, if you have internet access. Otherwise, I think learning how to make forms in Adobe will give you the most professional output.