I reckon that would make a nice article for the RevUp Newsletter,
small tools for big jobs.
Cheers,
Luis.
On 17 Mar 2009, at 01:22, Peter Brigham MD wrote:
The best reason in the world to build a tool is because you need
it. So I have been putting together a utility that I have been
wanting for a while now. I found myself continually filling out
paper forms by entering data that I had stored digitally and
feeling that I was wasting hours of time cumulatively in a really
boring endeavor. If you face the same problem, here is something
that might help. FORMalizer is a stack that allows you to import a
scanned PNG or JPG image from a paper form and overlay fields that
you arrange.
Once you have set up all your fields and adjusted your layout,
click a button to clone the stack, and FORMalizer closes, leaving a
free-standing stack containing your form and fields. Now set the
mainstack of your new form to an existing stack system. Once you
have done that, click a button and a script snippet is generated
with a line for every field in your form. It looks something like
this:
put empty into fld id 1280 of card 1 of \
stack "initAssmt" -- gender
put empty into fld id 1281 of card 1 of \
stack "initAssmt" -- DOB
put empty into fld id 1282 of card 1 of \
stack "initAssmt" -- age
Paste the script snippet into any handler in your stack system that
you want to handle the printing. Then you can adjust the script so
it looks something like:
put toUpper(char 1 of gender) into fld id 1280 of \
card 1 of stack "initAssmt" -- gender
put fld "DOB" into fld id 1281 of card 1 of \
stack "initAssmt" -- DOB
put doAge(fld "DOB") into fld id 1282 of card 1 of \
stack "initAssmt" -- age
Any unaltered lines ensure that the corresponding field is emptied.
The script snippet ends with some commands for printing -- all the
rest of the scripting is contained in the FORMalizer substack.
Feel free to try it out and use it ad lib. It's developed on a Mac
but should work on Windows -- on the other hand, cross-platform
stuff is sometimes tricky. I'm willing to try to iron out any
wrinkles left in it if enough people are interested. I think there
are a couple lines of script that make it only a Rev 3.0+ tool, but
if someone wants a version that runs in 2.9 I could probably adjust
it accordingly.
I guess that one or another of the really great report-generating
utilities can do this kind of thing as well, but I think it's fun
to build your own tools. Plus, it's cheaper.
Available at RevOnline, username pmbrig
Peter M. Brigham
[email protected]
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