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Formats for Electronic Forms?
Bifurcati asks: "I'm a grad student at the University of Queensland, Australia. I am frequently required to submit forms (e.g., annual reports) which are sent as Word or RTF documents and must be filled in electronically. However, these are almost impossible to use under Linux (e.g., StarOffice) because the tables and formatting are just too complicated and get mangled. Even Word for Mac sometimes has problems. Can anyone suggest a better, cross-platform format? Could PDF files with forms do this? What are the costs & learning curve? User friendliness is vital for both admin and student. Alternatively, can anyone suggest ways they could make their Word files more compatible across platforms?"
Add a bit of PHP, maybe a database, and easy form processing.
What about good ol' online forms? They are accessable from almost any PC, the users can't go changing the layout of the forms, data can be real-time, and there's no need for someone to parse the forms by hand.
Anything is possible, except skiing through revolving doors.
They allow you to save the data with the form, transfer the data to a remote source without any loss, and at the remote site you can process the PDF form with additional software. Individuals can save the form and take it with them to have the data entered, removing the requirement for a connection to the network (ala HTML forms).
Acrobat allows you to easily specify the types of data you want them to allow to input. There's quite a few PDF form creation software packages available as well allowing you to do to this.
We use them at my place of employment and have had only one problem: data entry sections that can widely vary. There's no way to make the section grow or shrink that we've found so if the form creator specified area isn't large enough to hold your data you could be out of luck when you go to print.
In that same vein they don't deal well with ad hoc data being added to the beginning or end of the form as a Word or RTF file would. The purpose of a form is to get away from that sort of data, but it happens.
My reality check bounced.
You can't just edit PostScript directly?
i was going to suggest something along these lines. if you're serious about it, you may want to check out xforms especially if you're doing any major processing of those forms once all is said and done.
It's perhaps worth pointing out that it's also a problem for Windows users. If you have a version of Word that's very different from the one used to generate the form, there's a good chance that it'll be garbled for you, too.
The funny thing is that university admin types tend to use ancient, unpatched versions of W98 (or even W95), so it's students with an up-to-date XP machine that are likely to have problems. OO on linux can often read such files better than recent versions of Word.
Of course, the real solution is to somehow educate them to the risks of using Word docs. But they're university people; they probably can't be educated.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.