[Zope] Generating Adobe FDF files from Zope / Python

[Eric Walstad]

Hi Anthony,

> >>> Eric Walstad wrote
> > If ReportLab is able to generate FDF's, that'd be great!  Can you point
> > me to some documentation on how it's done?
>
> Reportlab generates PDF. What's an FDF file?
It's the file that supplies a PDF document that has form fields on it with
the data those fields are supposed to display.
IMHO, the FDF file should be in XML format but isn't :)

> The first meaningful english link for "FDF" in google is
> "Greek Orthodox Folk Dance Festival", which I'm assuming
> is incorrect :)
Heehee, I found that one, too!

> A bit of searching around seems to say it's a Form Data Format or
> something - http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/acrosdk/docs.html
> shows that the most likely document is
> http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/acrosdk/docs/extapi/FormsA
> PIReference.pdf
> According to someone in my office, it's a pretty simple attribute-value
> pair type thing, and not too hard to parse...
Yep.  it is a relatively simple text file.   I need to make one on the fly
from some HTML form data.  The Adobe FDF Toolkit library has some handy
functions for creating the FDF files, but they don't supply a Python
interface to the functions (they *do* supply them in ASP, C, and Perl, none
of which I'm very experienced in).
So, I took the hacker's way out and just wrote a python class that builds
the FDF file from scratch.  It's a total hack, but I've got it working for
my simple forms.

Thanks for the reply,

Eric.