Posted by Robert G Laurin on May 09, 2004 at 11:36:26:
In Reply to: Re: Comet Enhancement (native pdf) posted by Jim Guerber on May 08, 2004 at 08:57:42:
Jim is probably right, my own finding in dealing with Acrobat and Acrobat Reader is that it is not as easy aws one might think.
We wrote a Comet plug-in using the DDE gateway and are now able to control some of the features of Acrobat and Acrobat Reader. We can even handle Acrobat Forms.
The DDE was originaly written to allow "page flipping" using Acrobat Reader with the implementation of some basic function as DocOpen, DocClose, DocPrint, DocGoto and a few more.
We recently added more functions to allow Acrobat Forms to be filled. Our change allow Fields to be filled using the .FDF file format. This supported by Acrobat and Acrobat Reader.
Modifying a PDF document for Forms is fairly easy using Acrobat.
To generate a PDF from scratch requires some sort of PDF capture program like the Acrobat Distiller (acts as a Windows Printer). Using the DDE interface it would be fairly easy to SaveToFile with a user supplied FIleName thus allowing easy document manipulation such as e-mail without user intervention.