[hylafax-users] RFD - Business form overlays/merging

["Darren Nickerson" <darren@hylafax.org>]

 

Folks,

 

We've begun a discussion on the hylafax-devel list which seems like it would benefit from a wider audience, and a wider pool of talent. Please, if you have anything to offer feel free to contribute to this discussion - we're looking for as much experience as possible from people who have faced (and possibly overcome) the following challenge/problem.

 

I'd like to consider adding an important feature to HylaFAX . . . the ability to handle forms & templates. Take, for example, a PO (Purchase Order) system, which routinely overlays simple ASCII (database-generated) on top of a PO form. Or perhaps the PO form is dynamically generated, it depends upon the company how they have done this historically. Another example is trade confirmations from a brokerage, or airline travel reservation confirmations. High-volume, always on the same small subset of templates. Most commercial fax software packages have native support for doing this, just as they have native support for the generation of custom coverpages (it's a very similar problem).

 

In researching how people are doing this now, there appears to be many proprietary solutions, most of which cost a great deal of money, and most of which do not interoperate with one another. These closed, proprietary commercial models are not something we're fond of here of course ;-) Some people use PCL (HP's Printer Control Language) and the very useful feature of this language which allows you to send a form template to a "printer", then a macro which tells the printer to go into overlay mode, and then the ASCII/PCL data to overlay on top of that form. Sadly, it looks like PCL lost the language war with Adobe (PS/PDF) and it's beginning to disappear . . . also there are no open-source PCL interpreters (ghostscript will write it, but will not read it). Other companies are using XML/XSL/XSLT with some success . . . but again their DTDs and the tools which generate their forms are all proprietary.

 

Initially it seemed like Adobe's PDF and their Form Data Format (FDF) might be a good solution, . . . until we realized that only commercial tools (Acrobat full version) can prepare PDF forms, and only commercial tools (like FDFMerge and Acrobat Reader) seem to be able to use FDF data to populate PDFs.

 

We've looked into ReportLab, which is an example of one of the XML-based solutions, and it looks pretty sharp until you realize that the technology to generate the forms is commercial (and expensive).

 

Let's face it . . . it's pretty tough to get a custom coverpage installed and running with HylaFAX presently. The eventual goal would be to replace HylaFAX's current coverpage-generation routines with this form-population technology. Therefore one of the requirements of any solution would be the ability to produce the form/template using some EASY! tool, which SHOULD run on UNIX but MUST run on Windows machines.

 

As far as I can tell there are 2 ways to proceed here:

 

1. leverage current open-source tools to get the job done

2. build this from the ground up, using today's most appropriate technology, and make the standard open, and the tools to use this standard free

 

Although 1. is most likely to lead to a successful result in the short term, I think 2. is really what the industry needs.

 

If you have thoughts as to how we might accomplish either 1. OR! 2., please feel free to share your experience here. How are you doing this presently? How would you have done it if you had the chance? If all of this is already possible with something which does not require a PhD in particle physics to understand, please provide pointers and a summary of your experience with this product, its strength, its limitations etc.

 

Finally, if anyone's interested in working on this project and has relevant experience, please drop me a private email to register your interest. This might well be a sub-project which will eventually be merged into HylaFAX, if successful, and really sounds like a lot ot fun.

 

I look forward to a lively discussion.

 

-Darren