Recently my company purchased a copy of Adobe Acrobat, and I was looking at the ability to do an OCR Scan to generate an editable form via Adobe instead of having to create the reports. Is there a way to have an editable PDF in a web browser (we use both Firefox and IE) and then update the editable fields using AJAX? If not, is there a way to have the PDF bind to a dynamically named XML file, where I can pass in the file name when the PDF is loaded into the browser? I can't use a static XML file name because multiple users could access the same PDF at he same time.
Here is more background about my current setup.
I have a set of intranet pages for various departments in my company. One department has gotten spoiled (and I can't blame them) where they just type in an employee's number and using AJAX I populate all the employee information in an HTML form. Once the form is submitted I write that data to an XML file that gets handed off to our report server. The server takes the data, finds the report that coincides with it and then prints out the report. I am looking to cut out some of the processing/development time.
Thanks in advance,
Josh
A PDF can submit data to a server, which can then respond with an FDF or XFDF response content, which can contain data to populate fields. If you want to stick with processing XML, choose XFDF.
See the XFDF Specification for more information: XML Forms Data Format Specification