John Jason Jordan wrote: > > I guess I haven't made it clear what I want to do. > > I want to create a PDF form where the reader can fill in the blanks > using Adobe Reader. Adobe Reader will not let them save a copy of it, > but it will let them print it out after they fill it in. Then they will > snail mail the printout to me. The advantage is that I don't have to > try to decipher handwriting. > > I created such a form in OOo some time ago, but I can't remember how I > did it.
For that I'd recommend taking a look at: http://openoffice.blogs.com/openoffice/2006/06/creating_xml_fo.html As for having users fill out the forms and then being able to email the completed form back to you the trick is: 1. Create the PDF form in OOo & export to PDF 2. Open the PDF form in Adobe Reader (or other PDF viewer that will all the form to be filled in) 3. Print the filled out form to a separate PDF writer printer. In Windows this can be accomplished by installing PDFCreator - see: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/ Note: Follow the green download buttons. I would also recommend installing Ghostscript separately as I've had some problems with the PDFCreator 0.9.3 w/Ghostscript file missing one of the required dlls. You can download Ghostscript from here: ftp://mirror.cs.wisc.edu/pub/mirrors/ghost/AFPL/gs854/ download and install the gs854w32.exe file or gs854w64.exe file if you have a 64. Then download the PDFcreator without Ghostscript version. The above sounds somewhat complicated, but it's not really -- takes about 15 minutes to download, install the packages & reboot. On top of that, they'll have a free PDF writer that they can use to print OOo, MS, webpages, etc., etc. The PDFCreator printer isn't fussy about where the print comes from, so if you can print it to your printer, you can generally print it to PDFCreator (with proper font embedding I might add). That's it, now when you go to print from Adobe Reader just select the PDFCreator printer and the filled out form will be created and printed as a PDF that can be emailed back to you or printed and snailmailed. In Linux this can be accomplished by installing the CUPS PDF printer. I recommend http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=CUPS+PDF+printer as I don't know what flavour of linux you may be using. I only wish that my linux CUPS PDF printer were as comprehensive as the Windows PDFCreator printer... :-) --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
