Hi everyone,

Does anyone know of a tool that can convert existing Word mail merge
documents into PDF forms? I need something that can remove the mail
merge fields and replace them with PDF form fields of the same name. I
have 228 existing templates to convert and I don't like the idea of
doing it all by hand.

I think that my needs are too specific, but please let me know if you
are aware of a toll that can perform this task.

Thanks,
Tony

Hi Tony

Tony wrote:
> Does anyone know of a tool that can convert existing Word mail merge
> documents into PDF forms? I need something that can remove the mail
> merge fields and replace them with PDF form fields of the same name. I
> have 228 existing templates to convert and I don't like the idea of
> doing it all by hand.

I doubt there is such a tool "out there", but I could be mistaken.

If I had to do this job, I would probably investigate whether PDFMark 
would work here, see:

http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/en/acrobat/sdk/pdf/pdf_creation_apis_and_specs/pdfmarkReference.pdf

 From the preface of the above document:

<quote>
The Acrobat� Distiller� application is a PostScript-language interpreter 
that converts PostScript� language files in to Portable Document Format 
(PDF) files. Because PDF has features (such as annotations, bookmarks, 
articles, and forms) that are not expressable using the standard 
PostScript operators, some PostScript language extension is necessary
to describe features that are present in PDF, but not in standard 
PostScript.
To satisfy this need, Acrobat Distiller provides the operator
pdfmark that is not found in standard PostScript interpreters.
</quote>

You should be able to use a PRINT field in Word to burry PDFMark 
instructions, print the document into a PS-file and then use Distiller 
to create the PDF.

_IF_ that's the case, then you'd "simply" have to replace the 
Mergefields into appropriate PRINT fields. Once you have this figured 
out, automation of such a replace operation over many files (VBA) will 
be the smallest bit in this task.

HTH
Robert
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Hey Robert,

That sounds pretty interesting. I will look into it.

Thanks!
Tony