SPUG: help with dynamic pdf forms

Itay Furman itayf at fhcrc.org
Tue Jul 15 17:53:51 CDT 2003


Yet another option to use is LaTeX to typeset the forms.
The source are TEXT files rendering them to easy manipulation (by PERL :-).
It should be easy to set up templates (I have one for a fax cover sheet)
Conditional typesetting is available, and relatively straight forward to 
accomplish.

The quality of Postscript or PDF produced is much higher then what is 
provided by printing an HTML (or any other *ML) without the TROUBLE of
actually programming in Postscript. 

Assuming user.tex holds one instance of a form to be typeset then
produce PS file, user.ps, with
	latex user
	dvips -o user.ps user
or PDF file, user.pdf, with
	pdflatex user

Converters to html, and interfaces to *ML are also widely available. Never 
tried them though.

	Itay


On Mon, 14 Jul 2003, Alan wrote:

> Howdy folks.  I have a project coming up involving filling data into PDF
> forms created by a design firm.  I'm pretty sure that this can be done,
> and hopefully relatively easily.  
> 
> Basically what I need to do is take user input and insert it into a
> pre-set position / form field in an already created static PDF.  I'm not
> all that familiar with acrobat, but it has a "form field" tool that
> allows creation of text fields, checkboxes, etc.  All I need to do is
> take user input and stick it into those form fields (I only care about
> the text fields).
> 
> Obviously creating the pdfs from scratch via PDF-Lib isn't an option.
> Can anyone point me at whatever the in vogue tool / library for this is?
> 
> Regards and thanks from up north
> 
> alan
> 
> 




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