[GLLUG] Form Generator

[Clay Dowling]

On 04/11/2013 05:54 PM, Eduardo Cesconetto wrote:
> Hello from Texas ya'll!
>
> I am looking for a solution to create forms to be filled by our 
> employees and emailed as a PDF to the approvers or people that need to 
> act on it. Currently we use PDF forms created in Adobe Acrobat(UGH!!!) 
> and we fill in and attach to emails.. Bad practice since I want to be 
> a OS agnostic environment...
>
I don't know of any ready-made solutions to the problem, but I used to 
do something like this to create PDF copies of insurance forms.

I create the form in Inkscape, with placeholders for my input data, like 
{CUSTOMER_NAME}.  When I received the user data, I replaced the 
placeholders with user data.  The result had to be run through some 
functions in the Cairo library to produce a PDF document, which I then 
emailed to the intended recipient.

I did it in C, but it's probably perfectly doable in PHP or python as 
well.  I don't remember the exact functions that I used, it's been some 
time.  It might even be as simple as running inkscape on the resulting 
svg file with the right command line options.  Google is your friend 
here, there have to be a few different ways to do this.

Clay