baffled by client request! (how to)

sk3pt1c said:

the odd thing is that he wants me to put the exact form online, as it is on paper.

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This really means that you need to educate your client on how this stuff works. You can collect the information using forms that make sense for the Web, and if need be later print it in the format that makes people on the other end happy.

so the idea is this: scan the paper, make the fields editable,

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This can be done with Acrobat, possibly Word. In either case, customers will loathe it. The computer is supposed to do the work.

There's no reason why the HTML form can't follow the general format of the paper version, but an actual scan would be taking things a little too far (reasonable for governments, perhaps, but not real people).

incorporate some Excel features so individual prices add up and
advances are subtracted from the total cost and stuff like that,

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You might do this with a bit of javascript in the form, but that kind of real-time updating needs to be handled with care if not all customers get the same discounts, etc. It may be less pain to do a submit-and-update kind of thing (possibly again driven by javascript to keep the interactivity there, the cool kids are calling this kind of thing AJAX these days) so that the calculations and the proprietary numbers are kept private.

add some check boxes and a number for each form (from 1 going upwards), and have the client fill this in and by clicking "send" have the form sent to a company email where it would then be printed off. then they could do the follow up by phone.

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It's this last step where your software can process the form (perhaps offline, so as not to keep the customer waiting) and put it into the format wanted by the store.

ps. do you think i'd need some sort of security in this transaction?
it won't containt any sensitive data, but will containt personal information

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Personal information is sensitive, more now than ever because there is so much popular awareness of the problem. Even if most customers won't care, nobody's going to complain if you use SSL and the more wary customers will appreciate it.

sk3pt1c said:

thanks for all the input mate.
ajax i think is far beyond the scope of this website.
i'll have to find a way to do it like you said, have a simple form
online for people to fill in and then turn it into an "acceptable" form
for the company somehow...
i don't know how i'll manage that exactly but it looks like the only way.
maybe i'll scrap it altogether, since i will need the security anyway.
how would i go about setting ssl up?
what i'd like is for the form to open in a different window that would also
be secure, so the customer can have the website open as well to see the product they want.

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I don't really have answers for you because I'm fairly new at this side of things too, but I'm watching your thread with great interest because I need to build something similar. I run a website for a summer camp and we'd like to get a real online camper registration system going. Ideally the end result would get printed up (by the receiving end!) to look just like our regular paper application forms, so the registrar, admin assistant, etc. sees a fairly homogenous stack of paper. It's not practical to have a web-based back end when half the time you need the info you're up in the middle of the woods with no internet.

sk3pt1c said:

i don't know how i'll manage that exactly but it looks like the only way.

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In the old days, we'd have had filled up a dedicated printer with blank forms and printed the stuff out to that printer.

A more "modern" way might be to print the details to PDF, then merge that onto a background with the original form, and email that to the sales rep.

It sure would be nice if they used a modern ordering system so you could avoid all this

maybe i'll scrap it altogether, since i will need the security anyway.
how would i go about setting ssl up?

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It would be a good idea for a business to buy a real certificate from Thawte or some company like that. It's easy enough to make your own certificate with SSL, but the self-signed type will throw warnings up on the customer's browser and undermine the confidence you are trying to gain.

There is documentation over at apache.org that explains how to set up SSL/TLS.

what i'd like is for the form to open in a different window that would also be secure, so the customer can have the website open as well to see the product they want.

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A column approach can work well too, so that you can keep everything within one window. One of the most successful interfaces I've seen is at McMaster-Carr, they make it very easy to get through a complicated order without losing your place.

this just screams 'quick and dirty crystal reports hack-job' to me...

I was really thinking of something more automated, where you might print the text onto a blank PDF page, then superimpose that onto an image of the form. It may be possible to abuse the watermark action in Automator to make something like this happen.

Couldn't you just use a php script and a form layout

on my sites contact page I have a table with my fields for name, email, telephone and comments which are linked to a php file which sends the information to a designated email address.
The email then turns up with (and the information too)

Submitted From: 80.77.243.186
Name:

Email:
Telephone:
Comments:

Now you should be able to do this approach but with more fields and then just print off as needed.

I'll be honest I'm no good with php (I got a mate to help me on that bit) and I'm not 100% certain you could do it so it sends to different email addresses for different locations to make it easier but I'm sure some php expert may be able to answer that if you like the idea.

As theres no financial info being sent its has not got to be secure as such, the only issue I have found is I get the occassional search engine email

I but you could make it look pretty close with tables and css.

Couldn't you create the Order Form [or scan it into] Adobe Acrobat Pro, and create an Editable PDF? I mean this waay they could use the same form, and then the cutomer could and in their info [or whatever], then when they hit send to would be saved and sent to their email address?

I have never had to build a site like this yet, so this is just my guess.

sk3pt1c said:

iMeowbot, i got what you're saying, but wouldn't you need to know the exact position of each field on the blank pdf so it matches the other one when you merge them?

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Yup.

can you do that in any way?

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Just get rough measurements, possibly in a regular graphics editor, then go at it with trial and error. This will be easier if the form already exists in a PDF or word processor format somewhere, because then you could mark it up and fill in fields.

If all you have is a bitmap, it might be worthwhile to recreate the form in a format you can work with more easily.

This kind of job can definitely be fiddly and aggravating, especially if the client is inflexible about the appearance of the output. I do hope that some of this stuff already exists in a usable electronic form, to save you some work :/

Sweetfeld28 said:

Couldn't you create the Order Form [or scan it into] Adobe Acrobat Pro, and create an Editable PDF? I mean this waay they could use the same form, and then the cutomer could and in their info [or whatever], then when they hit send to would be saved and sent to their email address?

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That kind of thing can work okay inside a company, but it can be troublesome for outside users (the customers). There are small but important training and support issues with interactive PDF, and (very important) other businesses aren't requiring this of their customers. It's better for everyone if the customer-facing interface is kept as simple and familiar as possible.

Well yeah, that's what I was thinking when I wrote about some of the other ideas, is that you would be automating it from the start.

One other way you might do it is to have ImageMagick and ghostscript installed in the server, and use a command something like

composite -compose multiply theform.pdf thetext.pdf mergedpage.pdf

That's not the prettiest output but it would be a good first approximation.

To make the overlay text, well, there are so many text formatting languages around, that's totally up to you.

You can open a regular image file in Acrobat Professional and use Tools->Advanced Editing->Text Field to create the blanks.

This page (with this one) has some sample PHP code that will take fields from an HTML form and plug them into a PDF document.

Acrobat Reader can't save forms that have had the fields filled in by hand, but Acrobat Standard of Professional can (so can the Mac's Preview).

Surprised nobody has mentioned using PHP and the FPDF library. You can present the user with a normal HTML form and generate a PDF document on the server side and handle it however you want.

http://www.fpdf.org/

This is just Automator, but it should work fine. You should make a specified folder for the PDFs to be saved in, then you would name each one something like 1.pdf, 2.pdf, and so on. Then tell Automator that you want it to attach & send the email using the highest numbered one. (Oh btw, you could have Automator just rename all the PDFs as the first action)

Anyway, here is a rough example.

Edit: Looks like I forgot to add the "Send Mail" Action!

Why not create a new order form for the store based on the new online one? then they look the same and you don't have to worry about trying to copy the existing form.

sk3pt1c said:

is there a php script i can use to actually attach the pdf to an email and send it to the client as soon as the order is placed and saved?

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In the stuff I linked to earlier, process-xfdf.php in the zip file includes options to mail the completed PDF, instead of using a browser window.