Re: [hylafax-users] [hylafax-devel] Re: RFD - Business form overlays

[Lee Howard <faxguy@howardsilvan.com>]

On 2003.02.07 15:36 Peter Brown wrote:
> Has there been any movement on this topic since Lee's email of May
> last year?

> On 2002.05.11 09:20 Lee Howard wrote:
> 
>  I recommend that we not give up persuing the usage of PDF Forms and
> that
>  we find/develop a way to read them in.  The folks at WISC
> (Ghostscript)
>  are most likely the ones to be headed in this direction already in
> the
>  open source world.
> 
> For what it's worth:
> http://www.ghostscript.com/pipermail/gs-devel/2002-May/001614.php

There really hasn't been any movement at all.  If you follow that 
gs-devel thread you'll see the extent of the information I have.

There are two basic problems that need to be resolved with the 
PDF-forms approach:

1) An easy, cross-platform way of creating a PDF form file.  Acrobat 
can make them, and it can be done using pdfmark in TeX also, but using 
TeX this way is not GUI-easy, and Acrobat is not free.  This is the 
least of the two problems.

2) That I know of, there is currently no way without Acrobat to merge 
data and to subsequently flatten the PDF.  I'm sure that *someday* this 
will be possible, but not yet, I don't think.

So for the moment I'd say that the current HylaFAX coverpage method is 
as good as any for what it does given these problems.

The only other thing that I could think of would be to try HTML forms 
rather than PDF forms and to use some scripting and html2ps to make it 
all work.

Lee.

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