Formats for Electronic Forms? 38
Bifurcati asks: "I'm a grad student at the University of Queensland, Australia. I am frequently required to submit forms (e.g., annual reports) which are sent as Word or RTF documents and must be filled in electronically. However, these are almost impossible to use under Linux (e.g., StarOffice) because the tables and formatting are just too complicated and get mangled. Even Word for Mac sometimes has problems. Can anyone suggest a better, cross-platform format? Could PDF files with forms do this? What are the costs & learning curve? User friendliness is vital for both admin and student. Alternatively, can anyone suggest ways they could make their Word files more compatible across platforms?"
HTML? (Score:3, Insightful)
HTML (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:HTML (Score:2, Insightful)
This is just what the net is good at. XML!
Honestly, it is!
Re:HTML (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:HTML (Score:2, Insightful)
MOD PARENT UP (Score:3, Insightful)
Crossover Office (Score:1)
PDF forms would seem to be a perfect fit. (Score:5, Insightful)
Acrobat allows you to easily specify the types of data you want them to allow to input. There's quite a few PDF form creation software packages available as well allowing you to do to this.
We use them at my place of employment and have had only one problem: data entry sections that can widely vary. There's no way to make the section grow or shrink that we've found so if the form creator specified area isn't large enough to hold your data you could be out of luck when you go to print.
In that same vein they don't deal well with ad hoc data being added to the beginning or end of the form as a Word or RTF file would. The purpose of a form is to get away from that sort of data, but it happens.
Re:PDF forms would seem to be a perfect fit. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:PDF forms would seem to be a perfect fit. (Score:2)
Also, LaTeX can create PDF Forms, iirc. I don't have experience with this aspect of LaTeX yet.
Re:PDF forms would seem to be a perfect fit. (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:PDF forms would seem to be a perfect fit. (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, I have read PDF's without printer drivers installed for quite a while. What you are describing is an Acrobat Reader (or perhaps Windows) problem rather than a PDF one.
Re:PDF forms would seem to be a perfect fit. (Score:2)
Re:PDF forms would seem to be a perfect fit. (Score:2)
Re:PDF forms would seem to be a perfect fit. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:PDF forms would seem to be a perfect fit. (Score:1, Redundant)
People who feel the need to resort to insulting others speak volumes only of themselves.
Re:PDF forms would seem to be a perfect fit. (Score:2)
PostScript (Score:3, Insightful)
Tested it with Word 2004 for Mac... (Score:3, Informative)
As for compatibility, Word 2004 has a nice feature called "Compatibility Report" which analyzes a file before saving it and warns you which versions of Word might have problems.
My general advice for forms is to implement an XML based form server. I know that Adobe is pushing their PDF forms server but that's really an overkill. If you have money to burn, Microsoft's InfoPath is a good choice as well.
What kind of people submit to ask slashdot? (Score:2, Funny)
How often do anual reports come round again you lazy bastard?!
Oh wait, you posted to: ask slashdot. Duuh.
I jest, I jest.
Learning Curve for PDFs? (Score:3, Informative)
No -- we need *fillable* forms (Score:1)
Sure, I can create PDFs with no problem using various software (it's built-in to OpenOffice, for one)... but I haven't seen free or open-source software that will let me create PDF *forms*, where the user can fill in the fields before printing it out.
Actuall
Re:No -- we need *fillable* forms (Score:1)
There is a method called 'pdfmarks' that allows you to use little snippets of postscript code inserted into the print stream. This can be done by embedding them in little EPS files and inserting them into your wordprocessor document as graphics. This isn'
XML (Score:4, Interesting)
XML would allow you to define (in a DTD/Schema...) the kinds of data that the form should be collecting and do it in a format neutral way. Then you could use web pages (translate the XML automatically to XHTML, grab the data and translate back). This can be fairly easily automated as could other methods to handle the input. PDF and DOC (and its cousins) are poor substitutes as you can't as easily identify the important information in the document, you can't store it concisely and you can't then do semantic level searches on it. Furthermore, in XML processing you can do consistency checks and so on.
In a web setting (or similarly "connected" kind of configuration) you could pre-populate much of the data for the user. You could even "compile" the xml to a set of online forms (XML -> GLADE or the MS .NET XML window description thing).
Once the data is entered into XML it can be massaged and output in any needed format (I don't know of any free XML to DOC format converter, but I suspect that the XML enabled MS Office stuff can do it if needed).
By the way, while that first step is easy to say, actually defining the DTD/Schema/... is likely to be rather difficult. (Look up sometime what it takes to specify an address [ozemail.com.au].) But this difficulty pays off immensely in that you know much more about your data, and much more about the ways it might be used. Once this is done though, the other parts are really pretty straightforward.
It might take a bit of work, but in the long term coding this up in XML is likely to save far more work and money.
Re:XML (Score:1, Informative)
Another XML fanboy.
First you create XML. Then you build DTD/Schema to enforce a set
of constrictions on the original XML (note: DTD/Schema were added
later to XML).
Then you 'automatically' convert the said XML to XHTML.
right, you build another XML to represent how to display the
original data within original XML/DTD/Schema. Such display XML
shall not be called XML, lets call it different things, for there
are different DTD/Schemas for display XMLs. The Mozilla crowd
wants you to use XUL, the ms camp wants y
It's not just a linux problem ... (Score:3, Insightful)
The funny thing is that university admin types tend to use ancient, unpatched versions of W98 (or even W95), so it's students with an up-to-date XP machine that are likely to have problems. OO on linux can often read such files better than recent versions of Word.
Of course, the real solution is to somehow educate them to the risks of using Word docs. But they're university people; they probably can't be educated.
PDF (Score:1)
The learning curve for setting up a PDF form isn't too bad, whoever creates these forms in the first place just needs to take their Word file, convert it to PDF and mark the form fields in Acrobat.
For the end user putting data into the form - if you've got a PDF printer driver under Windows then you can just print them back to a PDF, or under linux print as postscript and c
PDF-Scribus and OO. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:PDF (Score:1, Informative)
XFDL and soon XForms (Score:4, Informative)
Eventually, XForms should have enough support to category kill this problem. It's just taking a while because it has a lot of dependencies on other XML specs that make it difficult for implementors. I was SO glad to see IBM and Novell step in to provide resources to Mozilla implement XForms.
Re:XFDL and soon XForms (Score:2)
This XForms is perfect for this kind of application.
InfoPath (Score:1)
http://www.microsoft.com/office/infopath/prodinfo/ overview.mspx [microsoft.com]
Re:InfoPath (Score:1, Informative)
I've used InfoPath in the past, and while it got the job done, there were about 10 different other ways to go which would have gotten the job done in the same amount of time AND been cross-platform.
PDF editing (Score:2, Informative)