I am new to Acrobat and I need help with terminology. I work in an HR department for a small community college. We have a website for the public and a portal for our students and employees.
We would like to create a set of our new hire forms (tax forms, insurance, etc) online for completion. I know how to make each individual forms fillable and then put them online. What we would like to do is create a packet it you will with a cover page or mask that would put the employee's data into the various forms so they do not have to complete each form individually. Something similar to the way Tax software asks question and the forms are filled in. The employee would then need to print and sign their forms before submitting them.
I have a number of Acorbat books but can't seem to find exactly what I am looking for, please suggest some terms to look for in the various books. Or perhaps we are trying to create something in the wrong software package. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thom Parker's [url=http://www.windjack.com]WindJack Solutions[/url] has an example [link:http://www.windjack.com/WindJack/Examples/MultipartFormWizard_Demo2reg.pdf]Form Filing Wizard[/url] example using his AcroDialogs product that could be used to accumulate the unique data into s single PDF that could then be transferred to many forms.
With the introduction of version 4 of Acrobat, Adobe provided the concept of Personal Field Names, PFN, to gather data on a single form and then by combining individual fields build various optional presentations of the data like the combination of phone number area codes, prefix, number and extension into a single field. This data could then be exported to a special FDF file and that FDF file could then be brought into other forms and automatically fill in like named fields.
I have even seen s product that created an FDF file for each employee and that file was then matched with selected forms and the selected forms were then printed with the data from the selected employee FDF file. But this would require writing and interface program in a high level computer language.
AcroForms and Acrobat JavaScript is capable of providing a solution. As is LiveCycle Designer, but mixing and matching Acrobat Forms and LiveCycle forms provides another layer of problems.
It is even possible to interface Acrobat forms and LiveCycle Designer forms to an SQL database for storing and retrieving data.
George Kaiser