Posted by ahpeeyem on 02/21/07 01:39

On Feb 21, 8:09 am, "Perks" <andype...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Feb 20, 9:32 pm, "Bill Segraves" <segraves_...@mindspring.com>
> wrote:
>
> > Andy, it appears your reasoning may be flawed, i.e., you want to parse a PDF
> > with PHP in order to discover the names of the form fields. You really don't
> > have to parse the PDF to determine the names of the form fields, as you can
> > "submit" (as HTML - URLencoded name=value pairs) the PDF form to a script
> > that will do the parsing for you, transforming the form data into an HTML
> > form.
>
> > A script to parse the form data can be written in about one line of code,
> > exclusive of various decalrations, in Perl. I don't know how many LOC it
> > would take in PHP.
>
> > Cheers,
> > --
> > Bill Segraves
>
> Hi Bill.
>
> Thanks for taking the time to respond to me again.
>
> Perhaps I should elaborate a little more on the background to my
> project...
>
> Basically, I want for administrators to be able to upload a PDF Form,
> that they have created in various authoring tools, and formatted
> properly within acrobat etc to my system.
>
> I then want to parse out the form fields dynamically from the pdf
> source so that I can then create a PHP / XHTML Form representation of
> that pdf form, which their websites users will then complete. Upon
> completion of their web-based form, I will generate an fdf on the fly
> (following the tutorial link that I originally posted), which the user
> can then open to get a pdf representation of their completed form.
> Fine if it all works you might say!
>
> >From previous research I understand what you are saying in terms of
>
> you can configure the pdf form to have a submit button which does a
> POST of the value pairs to a designated script / page, but this is a
> complexity that I had hoped to not make the user go through, I just
> hoped that they could create the pdf and upload it, and I take care of
> the rest to great a nice, easy to use, user experience.
>
> Does that make more sense now at all as to why I am trying to go about
> it in this way?
>
> Kind regards,
>
> Andy


I might be misunderstanding, but to me it seems like the user-created
PDF POSTing to a PHP form would be a simpler UI than uploading a PDF.
This way the user just creates their PDF form and sets it to POST to a
predefined URL (like http://yourdomain.com/createform/). Your PHP
page could then do all the work behind the scenes and when it is done
send the user an email with the URL to the new HTML form.

Cheers

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