I've been through the process of submitting the application form and
sent multiple emails to Adobe to acquire the FDF toolkit.  I haven't
received anything  back since they acknolwedged my application, and
their 2 week turnaround is well over and done with.

Any lurkers on this group from Adobe that can get this expedited, or
any kind-hearted reader want to help me out and just send me the
toolkit?

Thanks,
    Rob

<rkischuk2@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1109183915.312475.221720@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
> I've been through the process of submitting the application form and
> sent multiple emails to Adobe to acquire the FDF toolkit.  I haven't
> received anything  back since they acknolwedged my application, and
> their 2 week turnaround is well over and done with.
>

"FDF Toolkit" is not the only way to work with PDF form submittals.

> Any lurkers on this group from Adobe that can get this expedited, or
> any kind-hearted reader want to help me out and just send me the
> toolkit?

If you're interested in pursuing other alternatives to the "FDF Toolkit", we
need to know the problems you're trying to solve.

Cheers.
--
Bill Segraves

Bill Segraves wrote:

> If you're interested in pursuing other alternatives to the "FDF
Toolkit", we
> need to know the problems you're trying to solve.
>
> Cheers.

A fair question.  Ideally, we would be able to take existing PDF files
and enable them to be filled out on the web.  Editing the files in an
Adobe tool to web-enable them is an acceptable alternative.

We need to be able to receive this data into a J2EE app server, store
it, and be able to recreate the filled PDF for viewing/printing.  It
would be nice to be able to grab individual fields of the submitted
form to store elsewhere, in addition to storing the filled form.

Thanks for your interest in helping!

Rob

I would recommend that you use an Adobe tool to take an existing PDF
and turn it into a form fillable PDF.

PDFBox is a Java open source PDF library that has the capability of
importing/exporting FDF information from a PDF.  It can be easily
integrated with J2EE application.

See the following command line applications
org.pdfbox.ImportFDF
org.pdfbox.ExportFDF

A command line example app to print out the fields in the pdf
org.pdfbox.examples.fdf.PrintFields

A command line example to set a single field in the PDF
org.pdfbox.examples.fdf.SetField

Ben Litchfield
http://www.pdfbox.org

<rkischuk2@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1109188355.900191.72700@l41g2000cwc.googlegroups.com...
<snip>
> A fair question.  Ideally, we would be able to take existing PDF files
> and enable them to be filled out on the web.  Editing the files in an
> Adobe tool to web-enable them is an acceptable alternative.
>

The full distribution of Acrobat give you the capability of adding form
fields to existing PDFs. You would also want to add "submit" actions to make
it possible to "submit" the forms. What your server-side scripts do with the
submitted form data is up to you.

> We need to be able to receive this data into a J2EE app server, store
> it, and be able to recreate the filled PDF for viewing/printing.

If you "submit" as FDF, all you would have to do on the server side is
capture the submitted FDF and store it. If you wish for the client to be
able to view a filled form, simply return the FDF to the client browser with
Content-Type: application/vnd.fdf.

The client-side browser must be configured with Acrobat or Reader operatiing
as a plugin in the browser. In addition, the client must have a live TCP/IP
connection for the client-server interaction to be functional.

> It
> would be nice to be able to grab individual fields of the submitted
> form to store elsewhere,

One way to do this would be to submit as HTML (url-encoded name=value pairs)
and have your script extract the individual fields you wish to store
elsewhere, e.g., in a database.

> in addition to storing the filled form.
>

Not a good idea, IMO, unless you have compelling reasons to store filled
PDFs, because you'd be increasing your storage requirements many times over
what you'd require to store FDFs.

One way to manipulate PDFs and FDFs you might consider is Pdftk, available
free from www.accesspdf.com/pdftk. Pdftk gives you the capability of merging
your FDFs with their corresponding PDFs and saving the resulting filled
PDFs.

Of course, you can provide this server-side capability with Acrobat, which I
understand is a very expensive alternative.

> Thanks for your interest in helping!

You're very welcome!

Cheers.
--
Bill Segraves

rkischuk2@gmail.com wrote:


>We need to be able to receive this data into a J2EE app server, store
>it, and be able to recreate the filled PDF for viewing/printing. 

None of these require the FDF toolkit at all. You can just store the
FDF and fetch it, serve it up later; the FDF toolkit doesn't do those
things anyway.

> It
>would be nice to be able to grab individual fields of the submitted
>form to store elsewhere, in addition to storing the filled form.

The FDF toolkit would streamline this, but it would almost certainly
be quicker to develop your own solution than wait for a legal copy.
(And don't be under any illusion; Adobe do retain distribution rights
and would consider "sharing" a copy akin to piracy).
----------------------------------------
Aandi Inston  quite@dial.pipex.com http://www.quite.com
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