Generate and fill PDF-forms by org-mode?!

Generate and fill PDF-forms by org-mode?!

[Torsten Wagner]

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Hi,

recently (well not so recently unfortunately) I have to deal with a lot of
forms.
forms forms forms... always almost the same, always almost boring.

I was wondering, can I teach org-mode to do this for me?

Ideally, I will use a org-table or org-properties, and execute e.g. a babel
src-code block which in turn will take all this properties and fill it into
a certain form and generate a PDF, send it to printer to let it me sign and
hand it over.

Hence I could keep all the important infos of a task in org-mode and
automatically generate necessary forms as requires.

E.g. lets take a order-form
I could keep company address, items, price, amount, as well as internal
project numbers,  etc. in a single org-node or possibly take it from
different org-tables, org-nodes, org-files, etc. and compose a form with
all this data. If the delivery address change, I only have to change it
once and the next forms will automatically contain the new address.

Did someone try something like this already.

Ideally, a ODT-export would be nice too, but I guess even harder to achieve.

Another problem I might have to deal with, is how flexible is the
administration. They might require to use only there templates (doc and PDF
forms). However, the PDF forms are owner secured and hence I do not have a
way to extract the FDF infos to interact in some way with them. Does
someone know how to fill a PDF form programmatically and if this could be
done within org-mode?

Any idea how to deal with that would be nice.

All the best

Torsten

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Re: Generate and fill PDF-forms by org-mode?!

[Thomas Holst]

Hi Torsten,

· On Aug 15 2013, Torsten Wagner <torsten.wagner@gmail.com> wrote:

> [How to fill in a form from org?]

I have only one form to fill in, print it, sign it and hand it in. But
this one is very boring :-(. The form is available as pdf or dot. Here
is how I do it.

When I was on Windows I used XL and word with a VBA macro. Now I
switched to Linux. I use org and LibreOffice.

I have all the information gathered in an org-table. A babel elisp block
extracts the information from this table. To fill in the form I use
=xte= which is part of the xautomation package [1]. =xte= is a
commandline tool which emulates key strokes and sends them to the active
window. I open the form (dot) in LibreOffice and execute the babel
block. The items to fill in the form are extracted from org-table and
sent to =xte= via `call-process-shell-command'.

This might not be the best way, but for me it works.

I also tried to use the pdf form in the same way. But it did not work
well. Neither in Adobe Reader nor in evince.

[1] http://sourceforge.net/projects/xautomation/
-- 
Bis neulich ...
  Thomas