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?"

Comments

HTML

[Fred Nerk]

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.