Hi again Tracy,

I have downloaded the trial versions of both Acrobat Pro 6.0 and the Designer 6.0 products. Acrobat Pro 6.0 seems to do what I need and is mostly working fine - I miss having the "micro-positioning" controls that I had in FormFlow (a toolbar that shows you the absolute position on the page that you could then change - I cannot seem to always line up things with just "nudging" them). I started off by scanning the app (the partners hear said that that would work best - this time around - as no need then to get legal okay from the LifeCos) and then am now working on overlaying the fields. It does not seem like the LifeCos will release .xdf type files to us - in fact only 2 of the 5 publish their forms in .pdf to start with - so I don't think this will be an option for us. I tried firing up the Designer product and loading the .pdf and it said that the "automatic" conversion proceeded but then the program crashed because it said it was so large that it would "affect performance". My guess is that it is breaking up the scanned image into many pieces and this has bloated the .xdf so much that it could not load.

Because the fields can vary so much between the 5 different apps (e.g. 1 app has a "M/F" text box and another has two different check boxes), I am going to build some sort of "transformer" object in between my VFP data that exports the xml depending upon the app. Am still in "think" mode as to how to do this in a way that is somewhat maintainable and "visual" enough that I can "see" what I am doing. I am thinking of a base (custom) class that has methods for each of the main "sections" of the app and then I would subclass it for each of the 5 apps and set properties based upon whether male/female is one character box or 2 check boxes etc. We'll see - if you have any ideas, please share.

The other reason for writing is I am wondering if you could send me a code snippet of what you have to do in #4 below: I am sure I could have fun figuring out the Windows functions below :-) but I would rather save a bit of time. All the other steps are straightforward enough so no need for code on them.

Thanks,
Albert


>Currently, the forms already exist in .pdf format but without fillable fields. We use Acrobat 6 to add the fields to the forms. Once that is done we:
>
>1) Enter dummy data onto a form in Acrobat 6 and export the data to .xfdf format. The .xfdf file is an xml file. When you open Adobe Reader and point to an .xfdf file and there are both a .pdf file (form image) and an .xfdf file (data) Adobe Reader launches the .pdf form and populates the fields with the data in the .xfdf file. Use the .xfdf file created when you exported the dummy data to determine the xml values required to populate the fields on the fly.
>2) Stuff the .pdf into a memo field in a table of all forms using FILETOSTR().
>3) When the user prints a form, we create both the .pdf and the appropriate .xfdf file on the fly. We use STRTOFILE() to create the .pdf form.
>4) If the user has Adobe Reader on their hard drive (we search for it programmatically by checking registry associations and locations on the hard drive if necessary) then we launch Adobe Reader programmatically from within our VFP app pointing to the .xfdf file we created and Adobe Reader loads with the pdf and the fields populated with the data from our VFP app. We use CreateProcess and GetExitCodeProcess to launch Adobe Reader and wait for it to exit.
>5) When Adobe Reader closes (we suspend processing in our app until it is exited) we delete both the .xfdf and the .pdf file
>
>The newest format at Adobe is the new xdp format and the Form Designer is called Adobe Form Designer and costs 449.00 It allows you to create the pdf from scratch and add the controls to the form. I would download their evaluation version of it and create a form and see if it does what you need.
>
>We are currently researching with Adobe how to implement what we are already doing with the newer format and tools. In September, ACORD will provide us the forms in the newer .xdp format (the form and the data are in one file instead of two) and we will need to use the new FORM DESIGNER to modify them. They can still be read and printed using the latest version of Adobe Reader though.
>
>If you have to create the forms yourself from scratch (not just add the fields to the form) then you will need to either use the newer Form Designer ( a single package that allows you to create a pdf form from scratch AND add fields to it) or a separate form designer WITH Acrobat 6. The newer Form Designer costs 449.00. You only need a server product if you plan on mapping the form fields from within Adobe to a backend directly which it provides odbc connections for.
>
>HTH,
>
>Tracy
>