Re: Do you know of a free PDF writer that supports the creation of forms?

["Edgar D' Souza" <edgar -dot- b -dot- dsouza -at- gmail -dot- com>]

On Thu, Feb 5, 2009 at 11:32 PM, Richard L Hamilton <dick -at- rlhamilton -dot- net> wrote:
> Kathleen,
>
> You are right; Open Office creates one of those PDF forms
> that you can only fill out and print, but not save. I've
> never needed anything else, so I don't know if there's an
> option for creating a savable form in Open Office, but I'd
> bet there isn't.

Richard, Kathleen, Leonard: if you're interested in spending a couple
more minutes trying it out, please take a look at

http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.phtml?t=52362
Quote:
================
 You need to create a "submit" button on the form. This is just a
button on the form whose action has been set to "Submit Form".

Then in the "Form Properties" box, enter mailto:yourname -at- yourserver -dot- com

Then, when you export to PDF, make sure the "submit forms in format"
is set to FDF (actually anything other than PDF seems to work)

Open the form, type in the data, click submit and VOILA ! Adobe will
give you a dialog box asking how you want to send the data. If you
click "Other" and then "save" you will have the option to save the
datga in FDF, XFDF, XML or text.
================

It's not exactly the answer you were looking for, I guess - Adobe
Reader still puts up a banner saying you cannot save the filled-in
form, but must print it - but if you click the Submit button in your
form (added as per the above info), at least you can mail the form
information out. The quoted text says Reader prompts you for a choice
of how to send it, but I just get a new mail message. Although I can
save the FDF file to disk from the mail message window if I need to,
this isn't something you'd be asking a lot of users to do, I guess.

BTW - I'm using Adobe Reader 8.1.2 under Ubuntu 8.10; YMMV under
Windows... I'd be grateful if you could post info on Reader's
behavioral differences under Windows, if any.

I've never had to do PDF forms myself, but this was interesting, to
know that OOo Writer can actually do this. Of course, by the time I
need to do something like this, I'll have forgotten :-( such is life
:)

Regards
Ed.
---
Edgar D'Souza (http://edgar.b.dsouza.googlepages.com/)
Check out my GIMP-Python "Tear-off" plugin, useful for tech writers,
at: http://registry.gimp.org/node/10977
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