PDF's and DB's

Hey everyone, I posted a question a little while ago asking how you can get information from a database into a PDF via a web browser. Well, I've figured it out. So I thought I'd share the wealth. 1. You have to have Acrobat and be able to use it to create forms in a PDF. We took the W4 form from the tax web site and used it because it already had fields created in it. 2. You have to create an FDF file. This is a Acrobat Forms Definition file. The format of the file is not that hard to figure out. You can get reference for it by going to the Adobe Website. The FDF file that you create really is only a text file in a specific format. So you could use PHP to query the database for the information needed to fill out the form. Then open a file handle and spit out the FDF information interspersed with the database information. Just like you would display information from a database on a page, you would just echo it to the file. 3. Once you've created the file successfully, you can just give them a link to click which will bring them to the the FDF file you just made. 4. The trick in getting the FDF file to populate a specific PDF file is in the '/F' tag in the FDF file. The /F tag lets you specify which PDF file you want to import your FDF file into. And lo and behold, it lets you link to a web server. For example, I've created an FDF file called w4import.fdf. I've created a link that will ask to display this FDF file. Within the FDF file I've told it to open a PDF at http://www.webserver.com/w42000.pdf. As long as you have the PDF Viewer plug-in installed and you've also created a mime type that you web server hands out and your Web Browser understands, then the FDF file will open the PDF file and viola. Your PDF will be filled out on screen. You should check out this link as it has the documentation that you'll need. http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/acrosdk/forms.html Enjoy! Marky