OT: PC World are useless - was Re: [Gllug] OT: microdirect.co.ukreliable?

[Mike Brodbelt]

On Tue, 2005-01-18 at 21:48 +0000, Tethys wrote:

> PDF also adds some nice interactivity features (like form filling) that
> sadly virtually nobody uses.

We've tried to use them in the past, but they're a bit of a pain. Most
people only have Acrobat reader, not the full acrobat, and in the reader
you can't save a half filled in form. People get quite irritated by
having to complete the form in its entirety and then print it. Acrobat
reader does provide a nice mechanism where you fill in the form, and
when you click submit it does an HTTP POST of all the form fields, but
there you run the risk of someone downloading the form at work, taking
it home, filling it in and then clicking submit on a non-internet
connected computer....

We've found that HTML forms are better for gathering information into
any sort of database, and PDF forms are only really useful for stuff we
put up that users have to print and post anyway. Even there, we get
gripes about lack of save functionality, but they're better off than if
we made them print the form then try and print data on top  of it. Where
we need more functionality than that, we take data from an HTML form,
output it as XML, then process that into a PDF on the fly with Apache
FOP.

Mike.

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