You may or may not know about Abobe Acrobat fillable forms, so this will either be a eye opening post or just a re-hash of something you already knew about. Recently I was asked if I could create a fillable acrobat form and then have that form emailed to somebody that you designate. At first I thought that *should* be possible but I wasn’t sure exactly how it could be accomplished, I know that one can create an acrobat form that the end user can fill out, that part is doable with acrobat forms but I wasn’t sure about the second part.
It turns out that acrobat forms have the ability to have a button placed on them with available actions that can be performed on them, including posting to a website that you hard-code into those actions. It has the ability to send the entire PDF to a recipient but the problem with that solution is that there are so many out there that use Hotmail or Gmail or any number of web-based email clients that abobe just gives you ability to save the filled out form to your system and then attach it later, so that wasn’t really an option for me.
One solution is to have the form button submit the FDF data to a php script on the server that knows how to interpret the FDF data and then parse that data and populate the same pdf file on the server. Here is a link with the basic run-down of what you need to do to make this happen: Acrobat Fillable Forms This approach is quite feasible if you have full access to your server and can create builds on it. In my situation as in most I am using a shared hosting provider so I don’t have full access, but if you did you can use the free library called Pdftk, found here: PdfTk Toolkit, I will go into my end solution for shared hosting in my next post.
