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Topic: Re: Can Acrobat Forms show/print expandable fields????
Conf: (P-PDF) General, Msg: 49518
From: kt
Date: 5/29/2002 04:32 PM

>From: "Connie"
>
>----- AcroBuddies Forum | www.acrobuddies.com ------
>
>Thanks for your reply Kas.
>I have a follow up question....
>
>I'm looking for a way to have a text field in a form that will accommodate
>a varying amount of text. In other words,
>some users will input several lines of text, some users will input several
>pages of text. There is no way for me to
>predict how much text will be input.
>
>If there is no way that an Acrobat form will reliably print the entire
>contents of the text field, is there any way to allow users to attach
>documents (i.e. MS Word documents) to the form that will be attached and
>transmitted upon submission of the form?
>
>Thanks in advance for any answers!
>
>Connie Dillon
>

Connie,

Acrobat and the Business Tools edition ($79) will embed or attach files
that way, but users of Reader can't do it.

I don't think PDF text fields will do what you want, the way you describe
it, nor will HTML of course. Fields always have a certain bounding-box
physical display size. What I think most serious forms CGI experts would do
in this case is let the user enter his/her text in a generously sized
field, then use the Submit button to transmit that text to the server, then
have a CGI script at the server send a confirmation back to the user. The
confirmation could consist of a new, dynamically generated PDF or HTML doc
tailored to fit the length of the person's input. Follow me? Then the user
can print it out and it will print correctly, in its entirety. The key is
to have a script on the server that generates a NEW doc containing the
person's field data.

As you know, CGI can be implemented in many languages, Perl and C being
probably the most common... and there are third-party libraries to help
with dynamic PDF or HTML generation. Some links on Perl-generated PDF can
be found at http://www.acroforms.com/dynamicPDF.html.

From this point on, it's no longer "easy" (but not exactly hard, either).




Kas Thomas

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kt@acroforms.com www.acroforms.com
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