NYCPHP Meetup

[Brian Dailey]

For Pete's sake, please do not use Word's "Save as HTML" feature. :P It 
makes a god-awful mess that won't render properly in most browsers.

My suggestion is thusly: instead of making them fill out a "PDF" form 
(which means the fields are afterwards difficult for you to get to), let 
them fill out a web form which stores the information in a database. 
When you want to print the information out to a PDF file, use FPDF 
(http://www.fpdf.org) to inject the information into a PDF file (via X,Y 
coordinates) and then output it to the user.

It's much easier and far more flexible this way, and you won't have to 
muddle about with Word documents.



- Brian Dailey
Software Developer
New York, NY
www.dailytechnology.net

Nicholas Hart wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I am looking for the easiest way to put an existing form (PDF) on the 
> web for very non-tech users to fill out.  Currently we have a form that 
> is downloaded as a PDF and mailed back to us.  I need to make the online 
> version as similar as possible to filling out the existing form so our 
> users don't get confused.  For the final submit, the data will be saved 
> to our DB and the full form will be printed as a PDF for the users records.
> 
> The way I see it there are two parts to this process:
> 1. Filling in the form:
> I have taken a Word.doc version of this PDF form and saved it as HTML.  
> I don't know if I can trust this layout for all browser and OS 
> versions.  Are there better ways to convert word to html?  How do other 
> sites handle this?
> 
> 2. Saving data and printing filled out PDF for user records:
> Is there a php library that allows me to place fields in an existing PDF 
> which does not have any embedded field names?  This would allow users to 
> save the completed PDF to their hard drives which would be helpful.
> 
> If anyone has any thoughts, suggestions or references to existing sites, 
> it would be much appreciated.  I'm looking to get started on the right 
> foot with this.  Thanks.
> 
> Regards,
> Nicholas Hart
> 
> 
> link to PDF: https://www.mptf.org:75/docs/TF2.pdf
> 
> 
> 
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