PDF to MS Access

I am attempting to implement the following for my school's website: School registration is currently a hard-copy form. They'd like applicants to fill out a PDF form online. They then print, sign and mail it to the school. The school want to be able to store the data entered by the applicant in the PDF so that when the signed application arrives, they can simply approve the registration for that student without reentering all the students info. The school system is run on MS Access (if it matters which version I can find this out). Any ideas how I开发者_Python百科 can implement an import from their form to MS Access? Thanks.

I've used a website called www.doculicious.com that does pretty much this exact thing. You can upload a PDF and have it converted into a web form. Whoever fills in the web form can download the completed PDF and print it out for signing. All the data is stored in the system and you can get it out as XML or CSV for importing into another database manually, or use the API to do that part automatically.

It depends on how automatically you want it to be. A fully automated case would be

1. Scan in the printed form using TWAIN
2. Use a Form Recognition library to align the form back to the original and find the zones with the information you want
3. Use OCR to get the information out of the form (probably ICR, if handwritten)
4. Find the original record in Access
5. Update the record with the new data

This isn't simple -- there are products out there that could help, but they are not cheap, and ICR is not very accurate.

I would suggest that you just do #4 and #5 in Access and give them a screen where they process an incoming form -- someone keys in the new data. That form

1. Lets you specify the record you want to update (like with a name or ssn)
2. Shows you the record with edit boxes for you to fill in with the form data
3. Saves it back when you are done.

This is straight-forward in Access.

The school can use a regular HTML form on their website and ask parents to submit details online. Your server-side can save the submitted details to your database and generate a unique submission token/key/code back to the parent on the web page. When the parents come to the school and mention the key, print their details on paper and ask them to sign it. You file the paper and the data is already in your database.

If the intent is to import from an electronically submitted form, I have used Adobe LifeCycle Designer to accomplish this very thing. Basically you can create an XML output of the PDF form data using an email client of the end users choice and have the data from the XML file read from the inbox into the fields of your MS Access database. Of course this solution has some serious constraints on what applications are to be used, as well as what use cases are handled, for example this solution is in a controlled environment in which all users are required to email there requests, where possibly your requirements may need to handle mailed correspondence as well.

I would add to VSU's answer by suggesting the use of Google Forms for data entry. You just need a free account, then use Docs to create a new Form.

It's extremely easy to setup, and the submitted results en-up in a Google spreadsheet that you can download as an regular Excel file (that makes it very easy to import into Access).

You have a few ways to share the form:

1. Email a link to the form
2. Embed the form into an email
3. Embed the form in your web site, which is probably the best solution for you.

Once the data is in your database, you can easily create a report and a simple lookup form to find the name of the applicant and print the form.

It shouldn't take more than one hour to get start and have something functional. You can always improve later once you've experimented with this.

The advantage of using Google forms is that it's free, it works well, and you are fairly secure since you're not linking your database directly to the Internet (and don't risk SQL injection).