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Things are not as easy as they might look, but besides of that, it is not really a surprise that there are not that many forms creation tools out there.
The main reason is that forms are not primarily created that way. Forms creation is more than just slapping fields on a base document. There is a lot of planning beforehand needed, so that the actual field adding procedure is only a small step in the whole process.
Deducting from what it appears that you have in mind is that you want to create "personalized" forms in big quantities. This is not really what forms are for. Forms are standard documents, which have their purpose as the carrier of a process. And the execution of such a process is repetitive, with different data.
Then, forms creation is (or at least should be) a well crafted design issue, and it will demand skilled designers to do that. Otherwise, the form is with a very high probability bound to fail. This means that forms creation is a highly visual procedure, and for doing that, there are design tools out there.
There is, however, a certain demand for automatization out there. This would then mean a high-end tool.
There is actually one tool out there which pretty much does what you want to accomplish: Amgraf's OneForm plus with the XML additions (http://www.amgraf.com). But keep in mind that there would be quite a high demand on your skills to set up viable style sheets and templates...
One more point. For (to me) non-explainable reasons, forms design tools are considered to be "office" tools, and apparently, the software vendors have not discovered OSX as the forms development platform of choice...
Hope, this can help.
Max Wyss PRODOK Engineering Low Paper workflows, Smart documents, PDF forms CH-8906 Bonstetten, Switzerland
Fax: +41 1 700 20 37 or +1 815 425 6566 e-mail: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.prodok.com
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Shameless Plug:
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• Conference presentations at the 2004 Symposium of the BFMA, May 23 to 27 in Reno, Nevada (http://www.bfma.org) and pre-/post-conference workshop, May 22/23 and 27, organized by essociates Group (http://www.essociatesgroup.com/AdvancedAcrobatForms.htm)
• And, as always, available for on-site workshops/tutorials/consulting.
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I'm on OS X trying to build some sort of system which will automate the creation of form fields on a PDF document. Ideally, this would take the form of, for example, a Python module, or just about anything else that could be run in a CLI/terminal interface.
The only even semi-encouraging system I've found is using Javascript inside of PDF, but that has such a painful UI, is slow, cannot be easily run in a batch process, and it is very cumbersome to import & export external data, so I'd really, really rather not have to go there.
I'm thinking of a dream tool where I could simply craft a text file, maybe XML, and specify field name, rect on page, font, text size, and all the other parameters found in the Field Properties dialog. The Acrobat form tools are so imprecise and unwieldy, that a tool like this could vastly improve my efficiency in creating, and especially maintaining interactive PDF forms.
However, I am finding absolutely NOTHING out there. It's ironic and unfortunate that there are _so_ many tools to create PDFs, but no(?) tools to create forms on these PDFs. I hope I'm simply overlooking something, but if I am, Google doesn't know about it.
So, if you're aware of anything (keeping in mind my OS X requirement), I'd love to hear about it.
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