Mail Merge using Adobe

[tinnerkhan12]

We currently have a set of Word templates which contain variable text fields. we use a .net application (we built) to open the templates, get information from Sql Server, render the templates and save the document as a .Doc file. We produce almost 1 million .doc per annum as each document contains our clients name, address and some information including the amout to pay etc

We want to rewrite this as we want to produce PDF's instead of word documents. to do this we want to rewrite the Word templates using Adobe

We have looked at some of the Adobe products but are finding it really difficult to find the right tools for the job

Adobe Acrobat allows form fields but these sit ontop of the document and dont allow variable fields to be entered into a sentence allowing the non variable wording to expand and contract. eg Please send us <Amount> of money to pay your <product Type> payment.

Adobe Indesign has some form for data merge fields that can be placed inside the document but once i save the document the merge fields become part of the text and i cannot find an API or 3rd party tool like PDFTron that will allow me to modify the variable data fields inside an InDesign template

Finally we came across Adobe LiveCycle. this seems to do what we want to create a document where we can insert variable text into a line of text and save the file as ann Adobe Dynamic XML form.pdf

Does anyone know if there is an API which can be used to modify the Adobe Dynamic XML form file to add the variable text from my .net application and then save the document as a PDF

many thanks

j

[Former Community Member]

I believe you are referring to a floating field. This "field" identifies where data will be placed in a text block and will expand or collapse all of the text around it to layout as a single block. This action is triggered when data is merged onto the form. You can do this by importing the data file (this is more of a user one of operation) or if you want to batch it all together you can use LiveCycle Server to do it for you. If you are intending on making the form interactive (i.e. the user can fill in fields etc.) the it is the LiveCycle Forms module that you want to look at. If you are merely going to create the PDF and leave it as non-interactive (like a Print) then you can use LiveCycle Output Server.

If you are still retrieving data from the DB to fill the forms then LiveCycle can do that for you too.

Hope that helps

Paul

[tinnerkhan12]

Hi Paul

Many thanks for yur reply

Do you know if we can control LiveCycle Output Server from our .net application. i need some way of looping around the variable fields so i can populate them manually, and then save the document as a PDF. i am sure LiveCycle Output Server can merge and save the data but we need to perform this task in .net via an API

regards

jk

[Former Community Member]

Yes you can .....LiveCycle can be called via SOAP from .Net. You woudl provide the location of the template and the data file and it will return a finshed PDF to you. Then you can do what you want with it.

Paul