JJCSR wrote:
>Thanks to both Mark Fuller and Mark Brown. I will investigate both
>of your suggestions. The ultimate goal is to reduce the paper output
>and still give the reader a viable solution to getting timely
>information.
Jim, for this I would recommend the free PDFCreator:
http://www.pdfforge.org/
You will see that name (and other popular open source names)
referenced on disreputable sites that link off to all sorts of
interesting places. Do NOT get PDFCreator from anywhere except
pdfforge.org, or from SourceForge.net which hosts the project.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/
I also second the option of using PrintWizard:
remove.pleaseNebula-RnD.com/products/printwizard.htm
This is one of the most under-rated offerings in our industry.
It has a lot of great features for a large variety of re****ting needs.
It's not MV-centric, it works for all MV platforms as well as for any
other software you have.
The price is just too low for all of the things it does. I'll send
you a link to download the do***entation on request.
>PDF allows me to give the user an updatable form, as
>well, from which I might want to extract data for other uses (E.G. re-
>order quantities to be sent on to a purchase order).
Whoe horsey!!! That last line there just changed the vision completely
from anything suggested so far. If you want updatable forms you are
not going to get them from any of the options presented thus far.
I recommend not using PDF for data entry. While it seems like an
elegant idea the concept is about 10 years old and it's no longer
necessary to focus on that as a primary option. See some demos I
wrote up back in the year 2000:
http://flashconnect.rainingdata.com/fcdemos/index.html
The PDF demo shows a PDF being used as a data entry form, and
FlashCONNECT passing the data back into D3. The connectivity pipe is
completely irrelevant, the concepts are all the same.
(The PDF demo looks fine but doesn't send data to the system. RD/TL
don't care about the demos (or selling software) and they have to be
told whenever they break the server that sup****ts that marketing tool.
So if you have any interest in giving TigerLogic more money, despite
their best efforts to discourage you from doing so, contact Sales or
Sup****t and ask them to turn on the server that sup****ts those demos.)
Today I would do that demo but I would encourage using other tools as
graphical data entry forms. These include in no specific order:
1) Common Windows Forms = .NET thick client
2) Silverlight
3) ASP.NET/browser
4) Heck, even AutoHotKey SmartGUI or other freeware.
All of the above are completely free. Then there is:
5) Excel, Word, Outlook, Access, or InfoPath = Microsoft Office
.... and a lot of other tools designed for data entry, or with varying
quality of data entry capabilities.
I can hear it now: "Hey, Excel is for spreadsheets, not data entry",
or "Hey, Word is for do***ents, not data entry", or "Hey, Outlook is
for email!"...
All of these programs are special-purpose wrappers built around a core
engine. But all of them also sup****t forms development and
deployment. They even work inside one another with OLE Automation.
So you can open an email in Outlook that's formatted as HTML, with an
instance of Word in the page for data entry, populating an inserted
Excel spreadsheet... The tools you use depend on what you plan to do,
so recommending any given tool at this point is premature. But you do
have a lot of input options to you other than just PDF, and you can
still generate elegant looking PDF do***ents as output if you wish.
Please feel free to contact me at any time, Jim.
Regards,
Tony Gravagno
Nebula Research and Development
TG@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
remove.pleaseNebula-RnD.com
Nebula R&D sells mv.NET and other Pick/MultiValue products worldwide,
and provides related development and training services
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