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I wish to create high quality printable forms - think complex paper forms like a tax return or insurance form. Ultimately just a form, but good looking, clear, consistent.

Currently this is largely a manual process in my organisation - desktop publishing (or whatever it's called now) type software is used.

I have a model of what should go on the form, and our electronic systems work from this.

I want to be able to translate our model into a paper form.

Further more, I would like human editors to be able to perform minor adjustments/spacial improvements - and then for the system to verify the document is still valid i.e. all relevant elements/texts are still on the document.

Therefore the format, whatever it is, must be both writeable and readable.

I'm open to any/all suggestions on how to do this, here are some of the options I've looked at:

1) Creating HTML pages with print media CSS - downside seems to be I can't include instructions on skipping to a specific page, because only the print function in browser knows what physical page each element will be on. However, verifying the document is valid seems nice and easy.

2) Word/Open office - these both seem very clumsy and readying the doc, looking for items seems ambitious.

3) PDF - reading PDFs seems to be a nightmare.

4) Latex - while there is some support for forms, it seems niche within the latex world.

Does anyone have experience doing this or suggestions on how to go about this? I am open to any technology suggestions, I don't care about platform.

Jonno
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1 Answers1

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I would suggest using HTML. I've created my own HTML writing library, but .net provides a class already: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.web.ui.htmltextwriter(v=vs.110).aspx

What's nice about HTML (especially HTML5 now) is that you can introduce javascript into "interactive" data.

Also, users can always export the document to PDF from almost any web browser. Downside is that any "extras" require folder structure (unlike with PDF).

I have finally uploaded my own library to GitHub, but it's pretty straight forward programming. Just insert your content between tags and write IO.File.WriteAllText() for a quick write.

Each class outputs as string of it's markup, which gets appended between the "parent" tag.

tbm0115
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