World: r3wp

For those creating documentation involving a face hierarchy, here's 
a function which may help to visualise it:
do http://anton.wildit.net.au/rebol/doc/demo-to-3d-layout-image.r

Anyone any ideas of how to take a plain paper form and turn it into 
an electronic form that can have text entered into it and then print 
it ?

as in X-forms?

in open office you can create X-forms that can be converted to PDF, 
opened in adobe reader as a form which then can be printed

Looking for a Rebol solution :)

But interesting ..

So, open office can create a pdf form ?

yes, straight out of the box

So, how then to prepopulate the form ?

I haven't played too much with that, but I think it's possible.

So, you create an xml form which acrobat can read??

yes

if you export it as PDF

http://www.openoffice.org/dev_docs/features/2.0/images/xforms.jpg

Say you scan an existing paper form into jpg.

how to go from there ?

you'd place it as a background image on the document page and then 
place the text fields where you want them.

How to print it though?

save as PNG and print?

no, you'd export it as PDF, open it in adobe reader and print it 
there

you can fill the form inside adobe reader

So, if you export as pdf... you can then do a search and replace 
for the prepopulated text and then present this to acrobat?

I'm not sure I follow you there...

is the form not meant to be populated manually by a user?

I want to take an existing paper form .. prefill it with some default 
values that vary for each user... get the user to fill in the rest 
and then print.

those default values will vary with the user?

yes .. taken from a database

I'm not certain if you can do that...

OO.o is capable of taking values from a database and put it in a 
document, but I'm not sure if those values can be transferred to 
a PDF form.

Starting with Rebol .. I can create a VID form using the scanned 
jpg as the background.

I can overlay some VID text boxes over the form areas.

I can then save the completed form as a PNG and print it ... sort 
of ..

yeah, there is something missing there...

if we had the possibility of using bitmaps in postscript or pdf-maker, 
then you could solve it in rebol

pdf-maker doesn't support pdf forms yet.

Gabriele doesn't have any current plans to do so either.

that wouldn't be necessary if you used a VID app to fill out the 
form, right?

so, VID => pdf using pdf-maker?

you could do that if pdf-maker supported bitmaps properly

and it doesn't ??

well I have not had any success with it

and it only supports uncompressed bitmaps

Oh, an alternative idea then.

Scan in as whatever .. turn it into an eps.

take the vid data and write it over the eps .... where you want the 
data ..and send to postscript printer.

that might work

Actually, what I am doing for infant growth charts is to take the 
pdf forms ... turn them into postscript ... add some growth data 
as postscript lines and then print them

I guess I can do the same for electronic forms.

Yes, that's what I can do .. it's the same thing.

But the end users won't be able to do this ...