At 9:00 AM -0800 5/3/01, Sadhunathan Nadesan wrote:
>My question is - does the following project sound technically feasible?
>Yes or no works for me, :-)
>
>Project:
>
>We want to provide clients with a PDF form <to keep locally on their
>own machine>. They could fill the fields on the form, then print it.
>We also want to collect the data off the form. For a single form,
>this can all be done in Acrobat. You can have a submit button which
>does a post command to our CGI server (which in turn sends us an email
>with the data).
>
>Where MC comes in - wrap it around a collection of forms. IE, nice menu,
>help, use MC to post the data, etc. Like one form per card in a stack,
>or whatever.
>
>Thanks in advance for any thoughts beyond Y or N.
>
>Sadhu
Do you want to replace the PDF forms with a Metacard version, or use
Metacard to manage and display the PDF forms?
Replacing the PDF forms with Metacard should be fairly
straightforward. Basically collect the data you need from the
Metacard forms (one form per card), format it as required for your
CGIs, and use the "post" command to send the data to the server.
The only problem I can see is if the CGIs are already made to deal
with PDF forms that are sent using Acrobat's FDF format. (I think
Acrobat can send form data in either HTML or FDF formats.) You'd have
to organise the data from the Metacard forms into the FDF style.
However, this isn't too difficult. You can find the structure of the
FDF format by saving out form data to a file in Acrobat (full version
only).
However, if printing the forms is of more importance than sending the
form data, it's probably hard to beat PDF for print quality.
Cheers
Dave Cragg
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