Posted by Bill Segraves on 02/21/07 16:41

"Perks" <andyperks@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1172009393.355057.174810@v45g2000cwv.googlegroups.com...
<snip>
> Hi Bill.
>
> Thanks for taking the time to respond to me again.
>

You're very welcome.

> 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

You could use iText, available free from www.lowagie.com/iText/, to retrieve
the form fields from the PDF (See Chapter 16 of Bruno Lowagie's book, _iText
in Action_, available from www.manning.com/lowagie, for details). For
licensing details, see the FAQ.

> 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!

Of course, with iText, you could merge the PDF and FDF on the server side,
serving the filled PDF to the client.

>
> >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.
>

You can do this with iText.

> Does that make more sense now at all as to why I am trying to go about
> it in this way?

Yes.

Cheers,

--
Bill Segraves

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