2 questions...

[Chris BeHanna]

On Sunday 13 April 2003 03:14 pm, Jd wrote:
> [...wants to convert his father's office over to FreeBSD...]
>
> There is only 1 thing I'm not sure how to do, and this is my question.
> The employees have to fill out forms for the clients.  Now these forms,
> when printed, must look exactly like predefined government forms (yes
> it's all legal).  Also, since it's the government, and they need to
> justify a few salaries, they change the forms every now and then.  I was
> wondering if anyone knows of a project that already exists to
> create/fillout forms like this, or if not an existing project, maybe
> just a library, a module, a something where I could start reading.
> Basically I want to create legal like forms to fill out for clients.

    Others have suggested Adobe Acrobat, but if you don't have some
way to get the form into the system to create the fill-in form in the
first place, that won't help.  I don't know if Adobe Acrobat (the full
version) can take a document from a scanner and generate a fill-in
form, but it might.  Check http://www.adobe.com for details.

    You might, as some have suggested, have to keep a Windows box
around (perhaps using an older licensed copy of Windows 98 or NT4 or
Windows 2000) to do this conversion, or make one of your boxes
dual-boot for those rare times when the forms change and you have to
create new versions of your fill-in forms.  Once you've created the
fill-in form, it can be served from anywhere (file server over NFS, or
web server, etc.).  You can even capture the filled-in form for
posterity by printing to a file from Acrobat reader rather than to a
printer, but that copy will have degraded quality, so you'll want to
print directly to the printer, too.

    What would be slicker than cat snot is to use web forms with the
usual pull-down menus and text boxes to generate PostScript to overlay
on top of a PostScript image of the blank form, and send *that* to the
printer, but that's a little more advanced.

    Once question you have not asked, but which is lurking, is this:
is your proposed user base sophisticated enough to have FreeBSD on
their desktops?  With a preconfigured window manager and a graphical
login, it's not as bad as a naked console prompt, but often, FreeBSD
(or Linux, or replacement-OS-of-choice) typically requires some care
and feeding, because there are always corner cases in a business
environment in which a user's desired task requires some setup,
configuration, or troubleshooting to work.  <heresy>This is where
Windows kicks free OS butt:  it's just plain easier to use.</heresy>
Yeah, you can't do a lot of the things that you can do on a UNIX-like
platform, but the things you *can* do are typically easier for the
typical office worker to accomplish.

    Yes, my desktops all run FreeBSD save my accounting machine, which
has to run Windows to run QuickBooks Pro.  There are also the
occasional websites-that-only-work-with-IE (e.g., www.fidelity.com).

-- 
Chris BeHanna
Software Engineer                   (Remove "bogus" before responding.)
behanna at bogus.zbzoom.net
                 Turning coffee into software since 1990.