by Mark Gavin
Otherwise known as AcroForms; Acrobat form technology was first introduced in PDF version 1.2; and, has been around for more then ten years. In addition to Adobe Acrobat; there are third parties which have released products to create Acrobat forms.
Following is a list of tools to create AcroForms:
The Acrobat Professional package includes tools to create documents using two different forms technology; Acroforms using the form tools under Acrobat; and XFA using Adobe Form Designer. Note: XFA is an XML based forms technology which in incompatible with AcroForms.
PDF Converter Professional includes a standard set of form layout tools very similar to Acrobat. Nuance has built an excellent tool for automatically laying out form fields on scanned forms. The software can look at a scanned image of a form, locate and place the form fields automatically; and, assign reasonable names to the newly created form fields. I was surprised with how well the automatic layout tool worked.
FoxIt Software has recently created a plug-in to their FoxIt Reader product with a set of form layout tools similar to Acrobat.
OneForm Designer Plus is the professional forms layout tool used by the IRS to create the US tax forms.