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I have the good fortune to own a Xerox DocuColor 3535 printer. In its day, it was a workhorse, delivering oversized tab pages in full color at blazing speeds (for the early 2000s). Mine happens to be the one with the embedded Fiery Controller, which had a lot of features, but wasn’t considered as robust as the external Fiery EX3535 or the Creo Spire RIPs that were available at the same time. Nevertheless, this machine is a trooper, producing high quality output year after year.

Unfortunately for me but also very understandably, Xerox stopped supporting this printer a long, long time ago. As a result, the last supported MacOSX version that works with the printer is 10.5. Yikes! Fortunately for me, the Fiery Command Workstation Java app still works, and it allows me to download PostScript and PDF files to the printer. The result is a clunky workflow that requires me to print to PS files on my desktop, as PDF jobs above the Acrobat 5 days will fail due to transparency and other issues, and then manually load them to the printer. This workflow was acceptable, and since it let me eke another few years out of the printer, I was not complaining.

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Jul 06, 2011 My concern is that I created all of our company forms using LiveCycle Designer, and to my knowledge, this program is not available on Mac. LIVECYCLE DESIGNER ON MAC. Alexmooredesign Jun 11, 2009 4:27 PM. Switching design programs to a MAC and I am really surprised that Adobe does not make LiveCycle for the MAC.
On the flipside, Adlib’s PDF software has competed for years with Adobe LiveCycle PDF Generator and if Adobe’s focus is indeed shifted from the enterprise space and subsequently LiveCycle, I am optimistic about Adlib’s growth opportunities if customers start take Gartner’s advice and look for alternatives.

Until yesterday, when I needed to print an XFA PDF from Acrobat. What the heck is an XFA PDF, you ask? Well, let’s gather ’round the fire for a moment and we’ll talk about it.

All PDF files aren’t created equally. Acrobat and Reader are very good at hiding this from you, which is by design. From Adobe’s perspective, the user shouldn’t need to worry whether a digital document was made using traditional PDF methods such as Distiller, a print driver, using a PDF library, or some other standards compliant method. For most applications, PDF is a way to describe the content and geometry of a document. Its roots are in PostScript, so it is no surprise that PDF is often viewed as synonym for digital paper. Over time, PDF evolved to include many interactive features such as the ability to play video, run JavaScript, and even play Flash content. Even with the interactive features of a rich PDF, however, PDF is really the closest we can get to Harry Potter paper. The pages all have a definite size, the fonts don’t change when you reorient the reading application, and the experience is definitely not responsive like a web page. This is OK, though, as PDF in its current form for most people is really about paper replacement, and as such there is no equal to PDF.

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Now, Adobe gave PDF to the world as a standard in 2007 as ISO 32000-1 to promote the broader adoption of the format and to encourage companies to build solutions that can consume PDF built using traditional methods. You can purchase a PDF of the PDF Standard at the ISO 32000-1:2008 specification download page or download a free PDF version of the PDF Spec at the Adobe Developer Connection. Kind of meta, right? Also included in the PDF specification is a section about forms. As you are likely aware, PDF files can also behave like forms, and there is a forms editing capability in Acrobat that’s designed to help convert a paper form into a digital form. Using Acrobat’s built-in tools, you can take a picture of or scan a paper form, prepare the form, type on it to complete it, and then send it for electronic signature. Pretty awesome, if all you want to do is replicate a paper process.

Now, deep in the PDF specification is a section about XFA, or XML Forms Architecture. XFA is a PDF variant that is the basis of ~~JetForms’Accelio’s~~ Adobe’s LiveCycle solution, which is now known as Adobe AEM Forms. The idea is that a document could be written not as something based on a page description like a sheet of digital paper, but rather as a structured array of content that could be rendered on the fly by Acrobat or other rendering technology. It was designed for forms, because in many cases, form responses were longer or larger than the space provided. With XFA, the form can just magically get longer to accommodate. It also allowed forms designers to include interactive and design features for the person who completes the form, such as buttons to add and delete sections or fields to a form, network connections to database solutions so that the form can have up-to-date content, and much more. This all sounds amazing, right?

While Acrobat can make a form using form fields, these Acrobat-made form fields are fixed on the page in location and dimension, and the average user can’t modify the layout of the page to accommodate more content. Acrobat can’t make an XFA form, but it can read, display and XFA forms. In order to make XFA forms, you need to use the Adobe LiveCycle Forms Designer or make it through automation using AEM Forms. LiveCycle Designer was previously included as a component of LiveCycle and in other desktop software bundles, but it is now only available to LiveCycle and AEM Forms customers. Why, you ask? XFA is used heavily by Insurance, Financial Services, Health Care and Government customers who use the business process, security, digital signature, document automation, system integration, and other capabilities of LiveCycle or AEM Forms. In addition, while XFA is included in the PDF specification, few other companies have invested resources in developing solutions around XFA PDF. This includes reading and viewing and interacting with an XFA PDF, so the only way to read, view and interact with an XFA PDF is to use Acrobat or Reader on a desktop computer. This is just fine when the intent is to enable workers in an Enterprise to engage with Enterprise business process using complex forms, but for the general user, it’s overkill.

This doesn’t mean that companies don’t use LiveCycle Designer to make standalone forms, which takes us back to the original premise. The Boy Scouts of America uses LiveCycle Designer to produce a the forms that Scouts use to manage and make the final reports for their Eagle Scout project. This form is great, because the Scout can use it as a notebook for their project. It includes fields with text, tables and photographs, and it allows the Scout to add and remove fields as necessary to accommodate the details of their project. For my son, this document grew to 34 pages and over 30 MB due to the inclusion of many photographs of his project. Now, even though the form is electronic, the local group that reviews the Eagle Rank Advancement wants a printed binder that includes these 34 pages as well as some other content, which is why I needed to print the PDF in the first place.

Printing the PDF proved to be very challenging. My usual method of uploading the PDF to the Fiery didn’t work, since the Fiery doesn’t support XFA PDF. I knew this ahead of time, so I tried to convert to PostScript from Acrobat. This also didn’t work. I knew that I could print to my inkjet printer without issue, so I decided to see if I could print to the 3535.

I remembered that Apple’s printing system is based on CUPS, their open source *nix printing architecture. I also know that it supports a wide array of network connections and adheres to the PostScript Printer Description model of defining the capabilities and limitations of a printer. I knew that while the printer has a built-in AppleTalk server and a built-in port 9100 server, neither of these connections work with modern Mac OS. I also remembered that the printer makes a Windows printer, and I was unsuccessful in printing to this printer.

I wanted to look at the options for the printer, which means either using the embedded web serv

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