Which LifeCycle Product to use?

[Former Community Member]

Please advice which LifeCycle product would be useful for fulfilling the below two requirements.



Requirement 1:

We want to create a pdf forms with paper form bar codes on it using the LifeCycle Designer. We will publish this pdf on our website and that will be used by our customers, our customers will download the pdfs and fill it, print it(paper form) and send to us at our office through post. This paper form will be scanned and processed via the Adobe BarCoded Services (deployed on the weblogic server) which will extract the xml data out of this pdf. This xml data will some how be integrated with our existing application in our company(To be decided how). Will the Barcoded Services be useful for above?



Requirement 2:

We will provide a capability for our customer to download pre-populated pdfs(with some basic information like Customer ID, Customer contacts) from our website. Which LifeCycle Services should be used to create these writable pre-polpulated pdf forms? These prepopulated forms will have some information pre-populated(from the database) which can not be changed by the customer. The customer will download these pdfs and submit to our website electronically, once the forms are submitted electronically, we will use the Life Cycle Services to extract the information out of the pdf and integrate with out existing application in our company.





Thanks,

[Jasmin_Charbonn]

For Requirement #1:

Yes, you'll need the Barcode service to be installed.



For Requirement #2:

You want to use LiveCycle Forms. LC Forms has the ability to populate data into a form template and create a interactive PDFs.



Then on the way back, you'll be able to get the data out.



Jasmin

[Former Community Member]

Hi Jasmin,



Thanks for the fast reply.



When I process the barcoded paper forms I get the data as tab delimited. Is it possible to get the data into XML format using some life cycle client API?



Thanks,

Amit

[Jasmin_Charbonn]

Yes you can, but you have to be careful because you'll be able to put a lot less information in the barcode, since all the xml tags take up space.



So it depends on the amount of data you're collecting and the size of your barcode and some other settings (like error correction).



Jasmin

[Former Community Member]

Can you tell us what solution you are using to Scan the printed documents?

[Former Community Member]

Thanks for your fast reply!



We used Gestetner(Printer/Scanner/Fax) to scan the document. Do you advice to use some other device to scan the document?



Also when we used to design our PDF forms with paper form barcode(Using LifeCycle Desinger), we saw that the size of the PDF document become large around 600Kb. This writable PDF is very slow, I have to wait for 5 seconds before I can type in the next field. And once the form is filled with all the information the size grows to 1100Kb.



Am I doing something wrong in designing the PDFs here?

[Former Community Member]

The time delay is coming from the barcode re-calculating after you exit from each of the fields. The fastest way around this problem is to cut and paste the code from the Calculate of the barcode to the Preprint event. (replace the cut code with /**/ to ensure the script is not re-created for you)



As for the size, do you have any images in your PDF?

[Former Community Member]

Thanks Lee!



I will try out what you have suggested.



There are no Images on the PDF. I notices that whenever I put a new control(like a checkbox) on the PDF it adds 2kb to the PDF file on saving.

[HowardTreisman]

Try turning off the option to embed fonts in your PDF, and stick to the standard fonts: Myriad, Arial, TimesRoman.

Thank should reduce your file size dramatically.

Howard

http://www.avoka.com