Interactive PDF - advice, please

Question

Live and breathe in InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop, am new-ish to interactive PDFs.
New project - a form - requires functionality that InDesign cannot provide. Adobe suggested I use LiveCycle, which of course is not available for Mac. Have outsourced project at the moment, but am looking for advice on what software is ideal for forms, etc. The first draft is passable, but some of the design elements are not as perfect as I'd like them to be.
Of course, I'm loathe to "build" anything in Acrobat, due to the lack of editing capabilities (there are ALWAYS author's alterations).
Do I buy a PC and LiveCycle? Do I suck it up and build in Acrobat?
Thank you in advance

Answer 1

There are a number of ways to quickly align fields, size them consistently, etc., you just need to know how to do it most efficiently. Here's a recent discussion that has more information: http://forums.adobe.com/message/4800377
As I mentioned earlier, when the source document needs to be changed, you don't have to redo everything since you can simply replace the old pages with the new, but you may have to tweak the position of some fields. Once you learn how to do this efficiently, it goes quickly.
Regarding the "NAME" issue, you can also use a custom Format script for the field, someting like:
// Custom Format script for text field
if (!event.value) event.value = "Default text to display goes here";
The default text will be displayed when the field is empty. Importantly, the actual field value will be blank, as opposed to the default text. When the field receives the focus, the default text will go away and the user can enter text in the blank field. It will reappear if the field becomes blank again. Since you can't enter JavaScript actions in InDesign, you'll have to add the script in Acrobat. I'd say this approach is better than anything you can do with an On Focus script.
Regarding the logo, this would normally be placed (as vector art or image) in the InDesign source doc. Is there a reason yo're not doing that? Is the logo an image or vector?