Open Office PDF Forms

Introduction

OpenOffice.org is an office package that can be used on a number of platforms and languages. It is compatible with all the other major office software packages. OpenOffice is a free software that can be downloaded from www.openoffice.org. Version 2 of OpenOffice is the first office package that uses the new OASIS OpenDocument format. The word processor of OpenOffice is called Writer: it can be used to edit text from one page letters to full books containing embedded pictures, cross references, table of contents, indexes and source material lists. Writer is capable of opening other document formats (e.g. MS Office doc), so documents produced in other word processors can be used as a starting point for editing. OpenOffice Writer supports the creation and filling out of forms. It supports Xforms 1.0, that is a W3C standard. The other important feature of OpenOffice is that it is able to directly export any document into PDF format. When a document created in OpenOffice is exported to PDF all forms related information is converted into PDF form information that is called Acroform. The PDF that contains the Acroform prepared in this way can be opened and edited with Acrobat Reader, but unfortunately it cannot be saved directly. PL/PDF provides a solution to save AcroForms prepared in OpenOffice and filled out with data from the database using PL/SQL. The actual filling out of forms can be individual filling out of forms by users using a web application or mass filling out of forms from a database table using PL/SQL programming. The resulting PDF can be saved into the database, can be sent as an e-mail attachment or can be printed directly.
If national characters are used then Acrobat Reader version 7.0.9 or above is recommended.

Documentation:

plpdf_oo_form.pdf

Example:

test1_oo_form_filled.pdf