Calculating Forms / InDesign or Reader?

[BlackPearl]

Bit of background; primarily I'm a website designer/developer but I'm used to working with InDesign for Posters, Booklets and Leaflets etc.

I've just upgraded to CS6 and I'm interested in exploiting the Interactive Forms part that is now on offer. I'd like to make a PDF with a few numeric text fields in, do some sums with the numbers and output them live in another field. Saving the 'form filled' PDF would be excellent.

I'm seen a lot of tutorials talking about exporting to Reader and then making the form fields but I would think I could do this straight into InDesign which would be better if there is any redesigning. I don't want to have to do all the work in Reader again.

So is it possible to tell InDesign to do the Math so when I output to PDF the forms already work and all I have to do is enter the numbers?

 

[hankscorpio]

InDesign won't do it out of the box

There is a plugin that will calculate fields in a table - but like the author - I haven't tried it.
http://indesignsecrets.com/calculate-totals-in-indesign-tables.php

It's likely that with this plugin that opening this file without the plugin installed on that computer would break all the computation.

So, you'd need to always have that plugin installed on any computer working on this file.