Adobe design question for barcodes and including PDFs

Question

Hi all,
I am new to using Adobe LC ES 8.2. I have been reading this forum and it has been very helpful. We have certainrigid requirements for our application that is making it difficult to come up with a clean solution. I am hoping this forum will be able to answer some of my questions:
Use case: Our application needs to mail correspondence to users (printed PDFs not fillable forms). We plan to use Adobe LC ES Designer to design all the forms and Assembler Service to assemble the documents together. The plan is to merge the templates with XML business data dynamically and then assemble them. When the documents are assembled together, documents to be assembled include Cover Pages Templates, Notice Templates, Attachments (could be templates or static PDFs) and decisions that will be converted into PDF from an RTF document using Adobe Professional 8. The user creates the document in RTF and convert it into PDF using Adobe Acrobat Professional and store it for assembly process. Our Print Shop requires the entire assembled mailing to have bar codes on each of the pages with the following information:
1 D 3of9 barcode - JOB ID (can be sent dynamically) +  PIECE ID (number of mailing) + SHEET ID (page number with in the PIECE ID - front and back of the page get the same number)
Following are the questions we have:
1. What ways are available to apply the bar code to the assembled document as one piece of information in the bar code is the SHEET ID for the entire mailing? I would know the total number of pages only after assembly.
2. If there is a way to manipulate the barcode information after assembly, I am not sure how we can handle bar coding the Decision PDFs that will be converted from RTF using Adobe Professional 8.
Please advice.
Thanks.

Answer 1

Thank you. So, using Form Services we can manipulate the document (barcode object) after assembly.This is great.I will look into this. When we spoke to Adobe, they wanted us to complete all merge prior to assembly and said we cannot manipulate the document after assembly.
How would I handle a barcode for a PDF that has been converted into PDF from a RTF document? My concern is that even if the RTF has a barcode, will it be a format that can be manipulated after it is converted into PDF by the user and submitted to the assembly process?
One of my ideas is to maybe convert this PDF into images and include it in the XML data as base64 images and merge it with an Adobe Form template having image fields. This is not a clean approach and I am very concerned about performance issues with the size of the data XML.
The other thing I am reading up about is "Underlaying pages" - http://livedocs.adobe.com/livecycle/8.2/ddxRef/wwhelp/wwhimpl/js/html/wwhelp.htm?href=0012 71.html#1548394&accessible=true
Any ideas?
Thank you so much.