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

[Brian Marr <cabernet@internode.on.net>]

Hi ya Darren, I have been with Linux for 3.5yrs now, and love it with a 
passion. I use Hylafax in my Home -Office. It is a very good product. I am 
just going through the job of creating a cover page. It has taken a lot of 
time, and I am still not through. Anything that can make this job easier for 
people using Open Source is welcome.

Regards
Brian Marr

On Tuesday 14 May 2002 01:24, you wrote:
> 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

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