Submitting a PDF form

[Alison556]

I have made up a pdf form that we would like to put on our website.

I'd like users to be able to just fill in the form and click submit and the form be sent to our email address.

Acrobat form submit just doesn't do what I want it to do - I don't want users to have to save the form and attach it to an email and ideally, I'd like the entire form to be emailed and not just the data (though if that's all that can be done, then we can live with it).

I've been advised that it would work best with a script to submit the form to our email address.

And I've no idea how to do that!! Can anyone help please?

Alison

[bernie1227]

Is there any particular reason that you are using a PDF rather than a straight form? It would be a lot easier and user friendly to do that then to have to fill out a PDF form.

[Alison556]

Mainly because I did the form originally to be emailed out to people. For the sake of continuity, it seemed like sense to keep the form the same for the website as well.

[bernie1227]

I would probably suggest an actual form, for simplicity if nothing else.

[djr33]

Sorry, but it just doesn't work like that. A PDF is a file, not part of a website. They can send it as an attachment by email or you could have an "upload" option on your site. But the PDF itself won't do this.

What Bernie has said is the best answer-- re-create this form as a website using an HTML form. Do not use a PDF. Then configure it to send the data to you directly. It will not be in PDF format, but it will work better for online use. Of course you can also keep the PDF if you want both options.

Finally, if you absolutely must have a PDF automatically generated you can do that. There are a few PDF libraries out there for PHP (available as extensions) and probably for other serverside languages. One for PHP I know about is mpdf and there are others-- search google as needed. But these will be hard to use and require advanced knowledge of PHP (or another serverside language).

So, it's all up to you, depending on your abilities/time/requirements. You could also hire someone to do it for you if you'd like. The "paid work requests" section here is one option.

[Beverleyh]

Maybe an online 3rd party service like this would help http://www.doculicious.com/do/home?

Or if you want to try and tackle it yourself http://www.daniweb.com/web-development/php/threads/136076/email-form-results-as-pdf