Posted by Perks on 02/24/07 13:35

On Feb 21, 4:41 pm, "Bill Segraves" <segraves_...@mindspring.com>
wrote:
> "Perks" <andype...@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 fromwww.lowagie.com/iText/, to retrieve
> the form fields from the PDF (See Chapter 16 of Bruno Lowagie's book, _iText
> in Action_, available fromwww.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

Thanks a lot for your help Bill.

I managed to get the iText system installed, and have written a little
Java to get the fields, which I am running from within PHP.

I need to properly test the stability of doing it this way, but it is
indeed a solution that appears to be working pretty effectively at
present. I would have preferred to keep the solution wholly PHP, but
in the absence of something more suitable, this seems to be working a
treat.

Thanks again.

Andy

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