Forrest and Form descriptions.

[Antonio Gallardo <ag...@agsoftware.dnsalias.com>]

Hi again!

Sorry, I am too new into the concepts of Forrest. I am writing after
searching all the doc in the Forrest web site and loking into the document
1.2.

Background:
Well, my job is now writing some specifications of a future web
application. Currently I wrote all blah-blah of process, etc. Now I have
some Forms in paper and I need to include this forms into the
documentation. The idea is to include and describe every field of the
form. Please note that the Web application is not developed yet.

My question is:
How can I archieve this?

I thinked in write some pure HTML pages that will reflec the form in some
way, then include the HTML form into the docs.  but I am not sure of that.
Because this will not be pure XML, just HTML and for me this is not
correct.

Master, can you show the light about this issue, is my approach correct? ;-)

Best Regards,

Antonio Gallardo

Re: Forrest and Form descriptions.

["J.Pietschmann" <j3...@yahoo.de>]

Jeff Turner wrote:
> Can FOP do forms yet?

It depends. If you mean "put some text and empty boxes
somewhere, perhaps with some small-printed hints, for
printing and filling out with a pen afterwards", then yes
FOP can do forms. If you mean PDF forms, then no, partially
because XSLFO can't do this, and partially because spec
conformance has currently higher priority than writing
extensions.

Well, actually someone wrote a FOP extension which basically
allows raw PDF data be wrapped for dumping it into the PDF,
this can be used to provide PDF forms, but you'll need
*very* intimate knowledge of PDF for this.

J.Pietschmann

Re: Forrest and Form descriptions.

[Jeff Turner <je...@apache.org>]

On Sat, May 10, 2003 at 03:41:28PM -0600, Antonio Gallardo wrote:
> Hi again!
> 
> Sorry, I am too new into the concepts of Forrest. I am writing after
> searching all the doc in the Forrest web site and loking into the document
> 1.2.
> 
> Background:
> Well, my job is now writing some specifications of a future web
> application. Currently I wrote all blah-blah of process, etc. Now I have
> some Forms in paper and I need to include this forms into the
> documentation. The idea is to include and describe every field of the
> form. Please note that the Web application is not developed yet.
> 
> My question is:
> How can I archieve this?

I don't know.  Would you want forms in the PDF, so they can be printed,
as well as HTML online forms?  Can FOP do forms yet?

> I thinked in write some pure HTML pages that will reflec the form in some
> way, then include the HTML form into the docs.  but I am not sure of that.
> Because this will not be pure XML, just HTML and for me this is not
> correct.

If someone can figure out how to do forms in PDFs, perhaps we could add
forms to doc-v20.

If you don't mind the lack of forms in PDF, you could create a custom DTD
extending doc-v12 but with forms support added.  You can prototype this
by switching off validation (in forrest.properties) and using regular
HTML <form> elements in doc-v12.  Or just *.ehtml files if you don't want
PDFs at all.

> Master, can you show the light about this issue, is my approach correct? ;-)

As correct as anyone else's ;P

--Jeff


> Best Regards,
> 
> Antonio Gallardo
> 
> 
>