Are there any good alternatives to Adobe Acrobat for creating interactive PDFs? The terminology is a little fuzzy here - by interactive, I mean "able to be filled in", and not necessarily "scriptable". So this form would be for data collection, rather than report generation which seems to be the common scenario for pdf-related questions on SO.
The trick is that they need to be fillable using Adobe Reader. For those who have not experienced the many frustrations of Acrobat - by default, Reader cannot fill in a form unless it was created using Acrobat Pro >8.0 and has specifically enabled usage rights. That's fine and it basically works (except then Pro users can't save their data - WTF?).
Because I am getting frustrated, I would ideally like to avoid Adobe products altogether (that is on the design side, for the users Reader is still a necessity or I would just do it as a db-backed web form). I'm wondering if anyone has has good experiences with alternatives? Either software libraries or products?
Thanks!
EDIT - Thanks, matt b - I'd seen iText before but didn't know it could create forms. Unfortunately, it looks like Reader cannot save filled-in data to the forms generated by iText (or generated by OO Writer). I've got the nasty feeling that what I want is fundamentally impossible except using Adobe's own rights management tools. If there are other ideas. I'd love to hear them.
You can create fillable form PDFs using OpenOffice.org as well as LibreOffice.
To create the initial form elements in the *.odt documents, enable the View --> Toolbars --> Form Controls tools, which allow you to add clickable checkboxes + radiobuttons, fillable text fields, pushbuttons and some more to the page(s).
When you're finished with your document, use File --> Export as PDF with the checkbox Create PDF form enabled.
Now your PDF form will be editable (and saveable!) with any non-Adobe PDF viewer.
NOTE, however: Adobe uses an own proprietary way to create and fill PDF forms. Adobe Reader does only support to fill PDF forms which were created by an Adobe product (and which have been assigned 'extended rights' so Reader can indeed save the formdata alongside the document).
Adobe Reader will not work with PDF forms you created with OpenOffice.org or LibreOffice ('work' in the sense of: 'allows you to fill+save the form data'.). The technical mechanism behind this is that Adobe digitally sign their form documents with their own key (which is known to the Adobe Reader, and which you agreed to not reverse engineer when you accepted the Adobe Reader EULA...). --
This means:
Non-Adobe PDF Readers will not be able to 'fill+save' forms created with Adobe products (they can 'fill+print' them however).
Adobe PDF readers will refuse to 'fill+save' forms created with non-Adobe products (they will 'fill+print' them however).
The latter two points will be true for all the tools and utilities mentioned in the other answers to this question. If I'm mistaken here, please let me know in a comment...
iText is pretty much the standard in the java-world for generating PDF files programmatically. Perhaps it can also be used to create PDFs with forms in them as you would like?
The open source page layout tool Scribus has a bunch of features oriented to creating interactive PDF forms. I haven't personally used them, but they appear reasonably complete and are covered by the tutorial.
Scribus is worth knowing about if you ever need to do serious page layout in any case.
XSL FO is some thing we used to create PDF files out of existing form data. Unless you want the fillable pdf to be sent out the client, this is a valid option.
IText lets you create Annotations (there are essentially 3 types of 'interactive' components - forms (old style FDF and new XFA) and Annotations. Acrobat and lots of third party tools should let you modify the Annotations values.
There is also a DotNet version of IText called ISharp - both are freeand extremely powerful.
CutePDF Pro allows you to turn a PDF into an interactive form.
Foxit reader allows you to save any pdf with the filled in fields.
I recently dabbled with Scribus. I found it to be an excellent tool if one has enough time to configure and play around with it. I highly recommend it. Wufoo is also very good.
I am not a fan of Acrobat / Adobe. A software should make my life easier not challenge me at every step.
If you search the net with these keywords - FREE FORM CREATOR and you can add the word HTML5.
You will find an array of sites where you can log online and all your clients can have their separate login, fill in data and the form remains in the Cloud and declutter your hard drive. All stakeholders can access the form and edit at anytime. The account can be used as a folder for your business. These forms can be accessed on any device and any platform.
Many of these forms are HTML5 driven, they are so beautiful and fluid. Keep away from macros, they carry viruses.
www.homebasedofficeservices.com
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I have created a XML file using R-exams out of just a single exercise to be imported to Moodle. I would like to view it before uploading it in the Moodle question bank. I tried to open it with Firefox and I can see some code but not the output and a message appear saying that the XML file does not seem to have a style sheet associated to it. Is there a way to find this style sheet and to see how the question comes out just using a browser like Firefox or Chrome?
To emulate how the R/exams exercises are converted to HTML by exams2moodle() and how Moodle displays mathematical content, it's best to use
exams2html(..., converter = "pandoc-mathjax")
In recent versions of R/exams the resulting HTML file then automatically loads the MathJax Javascript that enables correct rendering of mathematical content in all modern browsers (including Google Chrome). See also http://www.R-exams.org/tutorials/math/ for some general advice about math in HTML.
To the best of my knowledge there is no tool that would quickly display Moodle XML files in such a way that you can easily assess them.
In our application we are using Itext Pdf 5.5.3 library.
We have checked with some of the pdfs in which Checkboxes displayed correctly(check/uncheck) .
However there are some pdf with RadioBoxes and do not display radiobutton(on/off) correctly.
I also use this link to validate pdfs and java code
String[] values = form.getAppearanceStates("Checkbox");
return null values.
Also tried Itext RUPS and found that pdf which are working shows Form Field Names in RUPS Form Tab. And PDfs which are not working do not display form fields.
I tried generating pdf from word document and it doesn't display form fields in RUP , neither I can check/uncheck checkbox in Adobe Acrobat Reader.
What could be the solution to display radiobutton with check on / off ?
Edit -
I had created sample web application to reproduce the issue.
Please setup attached web application and let me know the fix for the issue.
Please download from this link
You have successfully discovered the difference between interactive PDF forms and "flat" PDF documents that look like a form to the human eye, but that aren't interactive forms.
To make the "flat" forms interactive, you need to open those flat documents in PDF editing software (e.g. Adobe Acrobat) and you need to add a form field manually.
You can ask Acrobat to guess where it should add fields, but Acrobat will be wrong in many cases for obvious reasons. You always need a human if you want it to be done correctly.
As for creating an interactive PDF from Word... Forget about it. Use OpenOffice or LibreOffice.
I work for a large financial institution and all our web sites need to be accessible for people with disabilities. We are using Eclipse BIRT to generate some reports and I want to explore if anyone out there has any experience in making the reports accessible. The main problem is that there is a lot of data in the report and some of it may not be understandable by the value alone, for instance a string like "123444" may be an account number, a check number or a transaction id. In a pure HTML page we will either use a dl/dt/dd construct to make it clear the purpose of the date, or we use ARIA attributes like aria-labelledby.
Another area of concern is the creation of accessible PDF files.
Any help or report on experience will be greatly appreciated.
Given your description I presume that you are focusing on blind users. One of the most popular screen readers for English language use is JAWS by Freedom Scientific There is a free trial version which you can download for testing and/or your organization can purchase a copy.
You can read your report with JAWS and find what issues need to be addressed. Proper labeling conventions for buttons and such is probably the most overlooked by developers. (i.e. Button123 with Image1A is the submit button, JAWS can't read the picture of words in the image, soo...)
Speaking from experience (I am closely associated with a blind computer user) stay away from PDF if you want it to be blind friendly. Web pages and text documents are much more blind friendly.
PDF works to create a version of a document that is static for visual appeal. In the process is chops up the text, when JAWS tries to read it it will read half of one item, then half of another, than maybe jump back to finish the last 1/3 of the first, leaving the middle 1/6 for last, it is painful. Of course a PDF that does not have text layer (i.e. a picture of a word document) is not readable by any screen reader.
I have a site that was originally built with FrontPage and then transferred over into Dreamweaver. There's a lot of old coding in there and a lot of image maps (think PhotoShop image slicing) for navigation etc. I need to move the site over to Kentico (not my choice) and I'm wondering if there is an easier way of doing it.
I was able to rebuild the whole template in Kentico and now I'm left with creating all the pages and importing content. Currently I'm copying and pasting all the content (text) into the pages I've built and I'm uploading all pdfs and images into the new system. That's all fine and dandy, but there are literally HUNDREDS of pages and THOUSANDS of pdfs. Is there any easier way of doing this? I'm going crazy!
Regrettably there is no easy way to achieve your goal as Kentico is ASP.NET application and your website is built with HTML pages at the moment.
You will need to manually transfer all the pages or you can use Kentico API to handle this programatically but you will need to parse the HTML pages on your own, so in this scenario... the best option is really to transfer all the content manually (or you can pay one of Kentico partners to do this for you).
The above Title is my Manager's words, not mine. :)
This is a follow-up to a question that I posted previously. After reading my assessment on the impacts of converting Word Templates from PC to Mac, I have now been asked to investigate whether Word Templates can be replaced with a "Platform-independent Web-based solution" (her words, not mine). She has suggested using Adobe Forms (ie. Adobe Designer).
Personally, I think the only truly platform-independent web-based solution is text files or html forms. What do other people think?
It's called WordprocessingML (aka. WordXML, WordML)...
Overview of WordprocessingML [Word 2003 XML Reference] at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa212812(office.11).aspx.
MSDN Search for "WordML" at http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Search/en-US?query=WordML&ac=3
It could be called XForms...
The Web was suppose to be platform-independent electronic documents. In other words, if you truly want platform-independence, then I agree with you and your forms should be in HTML. Yet, HTML forms are really not a good development platform. That is why Adobe, Microsoft, and others provide "form" solutions. XForms is an attempt to make developing and using HTML forms more flexible, overcome its limitations, and provide a platform-independent object model for completing HTML forms. You might want to look at XForms at http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Forms/.
But, I wouldn't call it PDF
In my opinion, working with PDF files is difficult. I have not looked at the file format specification, but I heard it is not trivial. Moreover, you need a custom editor and you are locked into one vendor, which is Adobe. (Yet, there are other open-source and vendors who support the file format.) Adobe is not know for creating programs that are easy to use.
My Suggestion
If you are already using Word, then moving to WordML should be fairly easy. You can easily convert your existing Word documents into WordML by simply saving them as XML from the Save Dialog; therefore, you can automate this process through code. In addition, I believe WordML supports form templates (the actual form) and data documents (the actual data for a form).
It's called PDF...
At the core (and without the million of extra unnecessary features" that's exactly the niche that Adobe PDFs were designed to fill.
I'd suggest you look more into Adobe Acrobat Professional for more info. Although, I don't think there's any good way to directly convert Word docs to PDF format.
Note: This question should be moved to Super User since it's not really programming related
Google Docs meets those requirements of a Platform-independent Web-based solution. Your mileage will vary with Google Docs though - if you just want to use it for letters, it's good. Much beyond that, it's rather limited. Unless you get the Premier (read: Corporate) version which you have to pay for, you won't be able to programmatically fiddle with the templates.
If you want a "Platform-independent solution", go with ODF or OOXML. You can make either "web-based" to your hearts content - maybe with HTML5 or another solution such as Flash or Silverlight.