I can’t decide what to write next. I’ve got lots of good topics and I’ve worked my way down to three that might be useful for the most people. If you don’t see the topic you want me to write, leave a comment on this post with your idea.

Top vote getter gets written first!

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Yes, you can install and run Output Designer on Windows Vista. It’s actually not hard to do, but because this stuff is all new to everyone I’ll provide lots of screenshots to make it easy to follow.

First, you might be starting off your installation with a pre-packed web archive - which would be one file - or an expanded directory of files.

If you have the single file, you’ll want to run that first and expand it somewhere as follows. If yours is already expanded, skip down three screenshots and start reading again.
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I’ve gotten a few requests lately for information on using these (and other) printers with Central. People try to send forms to them, but they don’t print. Instead they see garbage or nothing at all.

JetForm/Accelio/Adobe Central is as fast to print as it is because it does not send a completed and rendered raster to the printer. All that the printer gets is, in the case of HP’s, PCL. It uses the smarts built into the printer itself to RIP the code to pixels for printing. As a result, the files sent down the line are much, much smaller than any spool you’ll ever see come from a Windows (for example) application.

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Did you know that if your logging levels are set too high you can be severely impacting your printing performance? Highly detailed logging levels are routinely set on development and even testing systems, and by default, but are usually not needed on production machines. Regardless, when production machines are configured they are usually left at default settings and/or their settings are transported from development or test.

If your logging levels are turned all the way up, you can get insane improvements in speed with very little effort and only a teensy amount of risk. So what are you waiting for?

There is, in general, only one situation where you need to turn up your logging level: When you are counting pages to print “Page 1 of 10″, “2 of 10″ and so forth. Your first printing pass on one of these needs to have logging turned up enough to catch the trace statements that record the numbers, so follow my instructions carefully if you need this. (There are other uses, but I’m not going into all of them now.)

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This has got to be one of the most-asked questions ever. Either you have sub-companies and you want to print different logos depending on the company, or you want to print different addresses for different branch offices - or you want to do both.

Here I will attempt to explain how you can change logos on the fly using nothing more than a piece of information from your data file. As always, if there are questions about this, go to Ask JetForm Daddy and ask for clarification on what you need.

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The Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) has now been announced, but what to call an AIR “package”?

Surely we must have more imagination than just to call the things “An AIR File”.

Calling it a ‘Tornado’ or something similar might be cool, but it wouldn’t be very sensitive to the people that get blown about by the real ones. Calling it a ‘Can’ or ‘Tank’ wouldn’t work either, as people use different words for those things…like ‘Tin’ and ‘Bottle’.

So what nifty name can be used to describe the single file that embodies an AIR deployment while still sounding catchy and not offending anyone?

I respectfully submit: “Bubble“.

To create an AIR would be to “Blow a Bubble”, and to install one would be to “Pop/Burst a Bubble.” At the same time, there could be large or small bubbles, bubbles that won’t pop, or you could have problems with blowing a bubble.

I think it works pretty well, and it’s one of those nifty names that people will probably use in practice.

Any other suggestions? Am I off my rocker?

It seems like the Sun is setting on a legend. JetForm Central has been around now for perhaps 20 years, and after printing perhaps billions of pages, is due to be retired. My own history with the product spans about half that time.

Even though Adobe has laid out the roadmap for the demise of Central, lots of people still use it. There are a number of thriving companies out there in the World that do quite well supporting it (such as 4 Point Solutions), and even Adobe’s end of support date is now 2012.

With thousands of companies the World over still using Central for their critical business, I think good old JetForm still has a lot of life left in it. I also think that maybe I can use my experience with the product to help people out there who are still using the product, and perhaps even people new to it entirely.

If you would like to ask a question about JetForm/Accelio/Adobe Central or Output Designer, please go to the Ask JetForm Daddy page and submit your question from there. I can’t guarantee that I’ll answer your question - or any questions at all - but I should get to some of them now and then.

The idea is that, over time, the question and answer section might develop into a resource that people might actually find useful. (Heaven forbid!)

Of course, this site as a whole is intended to be about JetForm, LiveCycle and Flex and there will surely be lots of Flex going forward. But JetForm will always occupy a special corner of my brain…if not a special place in my heart.