Setting up, populating and printing a fixed layout sheet from the prowser

Question

HI Gentlemen:
Can you help me in my problem? Given a fixed, customer-defined form layout with boilerplate text intermixed with variables, I have to generate it, populate it from my relational Oracle tables and print it locally on the customer's printer. Every component is precisely positioned with font type, size and color prescribed as well. I have never had this kind of task, which resembles to an Oracle Report definition. Please say where can I find further instructions and probably a working example.
Thank you, kind regards from
Miklos HERBOLY

Answer 1

The steps for creation of an AcroForm are as follows:
1) Install Adobe Acrobat at your workstation. A new menu call "Adobe PDF" will appear in MS Word/Excel/Powerpoint. Use Word/Excel to design your layout and print it to PDF using the menu item "Adobe PDF->Convert to Adobe PDF";
2) Open the generated PDF document in Adobe Acrobat and add the necessary form fields, buttons, etc. Read the topic "Forms" in the Acrobat's help first. (N.B. Do not use the Adobe LifeCylcle Designer as it will create not an AcroForm but another type of form, use the menu item "Forms->Add or Edit Fields ..." instead);
3) Use the Adobe FDF Toolkit in a servlet to create a FDF response in order to activate the form from a Web application. (See this simple example).
Some useful links:
- Developing Acrobat Applications Using Javascript (Read the chapter "Using Javascript in Forms").
- Acrobat Javascript API Reference
- Adobe FDF Toolkit