Dynamic PDF Forms

Some time ago people work trying to work out how to generate dynamic PDFs on the spot to make assurances go a little smoother since a number of the fields could automatically be filled in, and you just setup at a conference or an assurance meeting and print out forms as needed which is a good idea. However at the time the only PDFlib usable in PHP needed a commercial license and CAcert lacked the funding at the time to pursue it further.

Of late I found myself needing to generate dynamic forms for a customer’s billing solution, I ended up using FPDF which is free for both commerical and non-commercial purposes. This then lead me to recall about people making requests for this feature with CAcert and I’ve spent a bit of time today making it a reality as this will be beneficial for a number of reasons.

This now lends itself to be translated in the same manner as the website, so the procedures to track and update phrases in other languages can now be applied to both the CAP and TTP forms. Already a number of people have translated these PDFs into other languages, and further progress is being made as I type this.

So this means that we don’t need to keep a bunch of PDF forms on hand in numerous languages, and updating forms in future is now a very easy task, as changing the layout or information on one form effectively changes them all so reduces work loads all round.

You can view the new forms by going here and here.

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