Session Overview

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Beginner Site Building
Resources:
Session Description: 

If you work in or serve a paperwork-heavy industry, such as finances/mortgages, real estate, government, education/schools, law, or sports, you may find that the delay between sending out a PDF form to be completed and receiving that form back are adding delay to your workflow. Even worse, you, your colleagues or employees might be hand-copying information from non-PDF formats to PDFs.

What you may not realize is that your visitors could be filling out forms on your site, and you could be letting Drupal populate your fillable PDF forms with that data! This is possible with a module called Fill PDF.

Rather than generating PDFs from scratch, this module re-uses form fields that you create with Adobe Acrobat®, Adobe LiveCycle®, OpenOffice™, or a compatible tool. This lets your PDF keep its formatting perfectly.

If this is already sounding like it would it save you time, this presentation is for you.

If you're a developer, this presentation is also for you. In fact, I can almost guarantee that your reaction will be, "I have a project I could use this on!" That's pretty common.

Presentation outline (the cool part is the Rules integration)
We'll look at how to set up a real-world form in Fill PDF. The end result will be much like the Fill PDF demo.

Then, I'll top it off by showing you the most awesome new feature in the entire lifetime of the module. It's on par with being able to stamp images on PDFs. It is the legendary...ability to e-mail the PDF as an attachment! This is made possible by the power of Rules and Mime Mail. This will blow your mind. It is awesome in ways that cannot be transmitted through textual explanation.

I'll take questions and tour additional module features with the remaining time. I'll also give a quick mention to Fill PDF Service.

Lots of people in real estate, as well as some in schools, sports organizations, and the mortgage industry use this module to ease the work of paperwork. It will soon break the 1,000-install mark on drupal.org. Come check it out!

P.S. If you checked this module out at SANDcamp earlier this year, check it out again. There have been several updates:

  • The presentation is now entirely in Drupal 7
  • You can stamp images from your site into PDFs
  • Did I mention that you can e-mail the PDF as an attachment now?

Coupled with Adobe® Reader® X's* feature of placing signatures on PDFs, there's a lot of PDF potential with Fill PDF in your toolbox.

About the presenter
I'm the maintainer of Fill PDF. I don't think enough people know about this module and want to spread the word. I also want to spread the word since I run Fill PDF Service, one of three ways you can get this module to do its thing. I've been working with Drupal since 2007 (Drupal 5).

* I don't think they've trademarked X...yet.

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