"Filling Forms - Desktop vs Server?"

By Rowan Hanna
PDF Store Support Team
Issue 28 for 2005

Printing to PDF and flattening the filled form are both economical and effective if your forms will be filled by users with known PDF creation or manipulation capabilities -- in a workgroup, for instance. If that's not the case, you will need to either distribute licenses of a chosen tool along with your forms, or limit potential respondents to those who already posses the appropriate software.

With either approach, the form data will become a permanent part of the PDF content, and may need to be manually re-keyed once it is received. Understandably, this can be a large task if you will be dealing with a large volume of forms. One way around this is to handle incoming form data on the server, which will be the topic of next week's spotlight. Stay tuned, and be sure to check out PDF Store's range of PDF Forms & FDF products.