Hi Tracy,

I have made good progress with the Adobe forms project that I emailed you about a while back - all of the Life Company forms have been scanned in and the appropriate textbox objects placed on the forms. I have also more or less finished the "data transformer" object that reads from the VFP tables and then outputs it as a .xfdf file in xml code. This part went faster than I thought it would (that doesn't happen often!). I can fire up the VFP form and press "Generate app" and the .xfdf file is created.

I am now at the point of getting Adobe Reader to fire up and print so I have been going through the code that you sent to me (thanks!). Without having actually incorporated the code, it seems as though you programmatically fire up the Adobe Reader and you get it to print with the /p switch. So far so good. Unfortunately, I am trying to do a bit more than that and so could use some guidance if you have any thoughts. Here is what I am trying to do (first two steps are the same as yours but repeated here for others reading this thread):

1) create the .xfdf file and copy it and a copy of the "blank" pdf file to a temp directory
2)fire up Adobe Reader which merges the xml data into the form and print it

(here is where I differ)

3) take the pdf file - which now contains data - and using functions in IBM Notes, copy that pdf file into our Notes document database
4) delete the original temp .xfdf and .pdf files

So far, I have noted the following:

a) for some reason, if the .xfdf file is fired up and it loads the Reader product, even though the data has been merged into the form fields, the data is not "kept" in the form when Adobe is exited (in the Adobe Pro product (6.0), you are prompted as to whether you want to save the changes or not - if you say Yes, the xml data is then stored with the form - exactly what I want. If Reader opens the form, the data is not stored in the .pdf file and even if you press "Save A Copy", what gets saved is just the blank form.

b) to do what I want to do, I have to suspend processing in VFP until the Adobe app is closed - this is what you do in your code via the ExeWait() function

Questions then:

1) if the Adobe Reader product is not able to save the xml data into the form, does this mean I have to get the full Adobe writer product for those who use this?

2) or, I read in the chapter "Integrating PDF Technology", that there is an ActiveX control that I could instead incorporate this onto a form and fire up Adobe within VFP. Any idea if this would allow me to save the form data along with the form (a temp form that is)? And would you know if the user's have to have Adobe Writer to be able to use the ActiveX product or can it be distributed to end users who only have the Reader product installed?

That's all my questions for now: will keep working away until I hear from you. Oh, I re-read the last note from you and you said you might be working on a new version - are you into that yet and if so, have you changed how you are doing the printing in any radical way? If so, mind forwarding your code?

Thanks,
Albert Gostick