Erwin's StarOffice Tango

Erwin's StarOffice Tango
Erwin Tenhumberg's Insights into Open Source and Dancing
... or why Open Competition matters

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Sonntag März 13, 2005

Just switch! - Creating PDF forms with StarOffice 8
In my last "Just switch!" blog entry I said that next time I would talk about the OASIS OpenDocument XML file format. However, today at CeBIT I decided to write about the creation of PDF forms with StarOffice 8. To my surprise many people at CeBIT are very excited about this new feature in StarOffice 8. Therefore, I thought I should tell more people about this new functionality.

With "View - Toolbar - Controls" one can bring up the toolbar with the form controls. For my little "article" today I created a very simple registration form containing a few text and combo boxes.

Selecting "Controls ..." from the right-click menu brings up the properties dialog.

For the "Title" list entries I typed "Mr.", "Ms." and "Mrs." and used SHIFT+ENTER to separate the words. One can also type everything as one string with a semicolon as the delimiter.

For the second combo box I also assigned a simple help text for testing purposes.

The exported PDF document includes the text boxes, the combo boxes, the combo box list entries and the help text.

StarOffice 8 is a very powerful tool for creating forms. With the new XForms support which I will explain in more detail later, StarOffice 8 also supports an open standard for forms.
( Mrz 13 2005, 09:44:13 PM CET ) Permalink Kommentare [3]