submiting a form

[wbailey@adobeforums.com]

Have created a fillable form with a submit button using Acrobat Pro 7. Put an FTP link to it on a website. User can access the site, download the form and fill it in, but apparently the submit button only works if the user has Acrobat Pro on his/her website. Is there a workaround, as most of my users do no have Acrobat Pro?

[pgary]

wbailey;

Once you've made the submit button in Acrobat Pro 7, you then have to go to "Advanced > Forms > Initiate Data File Collection Workflow" and set up receipt of the form or .fdf (data) files at your end. It basically requires that you add e-mail addresses of those who will respond to your form. To my knowledge, your respondents require Reader 7 to access this feature. Although I have not used Acrobat 8, my understanding is that 8 enables Reader's embedded rights and as such, should allow any user that download your form to end it and return it.

As to the Acrobat 7 set up; I've published for my users a newsletter last month on this subject. Feel free to drop me an e-mail and I'll be happy to send you a copy free of charge.

Cheers.

[wbailey@adobeforums.com]

Well, this form is posted on a website, I don't know a priori who will be responding. Actually, what I would prefer is to permit users to type directly on the form on the webpage without having to download it, but I haven't been able to accomplish this. But downloading the file to their computer is an acceptable, tho less preferred, choice. But it would be nice if the submit button worked on the downloaded form. It works on my G5 desktop, but I have Acrobat 7 Pro; on my G4 laptop, with Acrobat Reader 8, pressing the submit button gets a message "This operation is not permitted", same result on a friend's PC with Reader 7.

I would be happy to get a copy of your newsletter. Thanks.

[pgary]

Filling forms with Reader and being able to send them back to the source without having to resort to a server/perl script and expensive back end infrastructure has been a long awaited need, especially for small organizations/businesses.

As I mentioned earlier, I have not used Acrobat 8 yet, but the information I received was that you could Enable Reader rights to fill out forms with Reader (8?) and send them back to the source without having to register every user's email, as is the case in 7. You may have to upgrade to 8 for your particular needs.

As to the newsletter, no problem. Simply drop me an e-mail and I'll pass it along to you.

Cheers.

[Jon Bessant]

With Acrobat 8 you can initiate a forms distribution workflow which can
enable the data to return back to the initiator and then collect via
..csv - very cool .. even for Reader 8 users ...

You can even track the progress of the workflow (Forms/Tracker) and then
combine within the *new* package format to export to XML / CSV format
(although not via an on-line database - but GREAT for non-IT bods) ...

The Adobe EULA limits the forms receipt to 500 users per copy of Acrobat
8 Professional - but I'm a bit unclear about how Adobe police this?
(Leonard)??

Jon

[Steve_Werner@adobeforums.com]

I don't think Adobe will try to police this (how could they?). It will probably be based on the honor system. But each form return has to be manually imported into the database (can't be batched) so that should limit people from using it for thousands of returns.