[BNM] PHP Generated or Filled PDF Forms

[AndrewGill73@gmail.com]

Leo,
Hello. I've used fpdf (http://www.fpdf.org/) a couple of times in the
past to generate pdf files on the fly.

And there appears to be an fpdf extension to create pdf forms. A big
downside is that it's in German (all documentation in german) so i may
be barking up the wrong tree!

http://www.cix-blog.de/Blog-Projekt-FPDF-AcroForm.html

Hope this might help.

cheers,
Andy Gill

2009/3/18 Leo Brown <lists at acumendevelopment.net>:
> Hi
>
> Ah ok. I think I'm trying to approach the same way you're suggesting. And
> the only way you can auto-populate PDF forms that I know of is using this
> XDF syntax. I downloaded the source on koivi.com, and noticed there was a
> tutorial, which matches this approach:
>
>        http://koivi.com/fill-pdf-form-fields/tutorial.php
>
> Opened a draft direct debit mandate sent to me by my bank in Word, printed
> it via Office for Mac to PDF, and then opened the PDF in Acrobat Pro.
> Acrobat had an 'auto detect form' option, and it successfully detected every
> bloody field, with correct font size, correct label, everything.
>
> Only mistake it made was trying to make a form field out of the signature
> field, which obviously we can't do.
>
> It's rare that computing really seems to behave as well as we think it
> should, but lovely when it happens!
>
> Leo
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: bnmlist-bounces at brightonnewmedia.org
> [mailto:bnmlist-bounces at brightonnewmedia.org] On Behalf Of paul perrin
> Sent: 18 March 2009 11:09
> To: Brighton New Media
> Subject: Re: [BNM] PHP Generated or Filled PDF Forms
>
> I'd approach it the other way round.
>
> Write a bog standard PDF form that initally populates itself and then
> lets the user edit/save/send/print.
>
> I guess the initial population could be from the query string, or the
> form could do a get the very first time it is opened (if it fails, no
> defaults -- not fatal).
>
> Paul /)/+)
>
> 2009/3/18 Leo Brown <lists at acumendevelopment.net>:
>> Hi list
>>
>> I've seen a bunch of discussions on this but nothing that exactly matches
> or
>> helps.
>>
>> We want to change our Direct Debit structure so that the paper mandates
> are
>> either easily filled in PDF forms to be printed, or better yet, pre-filled
>> by PHP as PDF forms, making it a super-easy process.
>>
>> Here's an example of something I thought would help:
>> http://koivi.com/fill-pdf-form-fields
>>
>> Except it's not exactly inspiring that it doesn't work. And you have to
> make
>> the PDFs manually rather than generate them, which I was hoping to avoid,
>> but since FPDF etc don't support forms, I think I'll have to let this one
>> go.
>>
>> Oh, and the code hasn't been maintained for 3 years and the author says
> he's
>> tired of people to ask how to make it work so he's just put up the source
>> code :)
>>
>> Just wondering if anyone's got any similar solutions they've used before,
> or
>> if you have a similar need we could join forces...
>>
>> Leo
>>
>>
>>
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