Acrobat PDF forms

OK, I will elect myself to get together the list of variables that can be used. We had this discussion before about variables in synapse postscript templates, but I cannot find the forum posts about it.

I did some more research on exporting/importing the value of combo boxes or list boxes in XFDF. XFDF can contain the value of the selected item of a combo box or list box, but as nearly as I can tell, not the whole list.

I think we could simply make a long text box that could contain several diagnoses, and just manually drag, cut, and edit out or paste back into the box the diagnosis(es) that you want. We could maybe even make a little javascript box that would automate this process, that "crops" the list to the highlighted selection. The resulting selection will be auto-positioned to the far left inside the text box (this can be changed).

Technically, all AcroForm controls are referred to as PDF "annotations". The first time I saw this in Scribus, it sort of threw me for a loop because I was picturing Paperport type of e-sticky notes. I think all of these programs that offer to add e-stickies to a PDF are just adding a fancied up text box.

Try the DischargeForm and see what you think ...

What was supposed to happen is that the DischargeForm pdf is supposed to show a comment where you can see all the diagnoses.

However, this only worked for Acrobat Pro. To get it to work for Acrobat Reader, I had to modify the PDF by going to Advanced, and enabling user rights as per this document

http://help.adobe.com/en_US/Acrobat/8.0/Professional/help.html?content=WS58a04a822e3e50102bd615109794195ff-7e0d.html

So, if you have pdfs where you want to display the diagnoses in a comment, you will need at least one copy Acrobat Pro to enable this.

Now to google to see if any other tools will enable a PDF like this.

Apparently Foxit has tools that will do it (haven't tried it)... http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/reader/

Googling, it appears you can get a copy of Acrobat Pro 8 for +/- $90, and Pro 9 for $150-200 (or less maybe?), the other guys claim they can do more stuff for less bucks....

I've tried using http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/reader/ with Synapse on one PC for a while now. It seems to choke easily when I VIEW alot of .pdfs.

1 copy of Acrobat is not expensive. I say go with that.

I agree. I'm the one that really wants AcroForms, so I will see if I can pony up a copy for reasonable expense.

Well, I have the Synapse client working with acroforms now .. and will be likely releasing a new client/server pair this weekend so people can test it then.

I'll have to run some more tests as well.

You will have to have the Physician web portal running as well as that will process the acroform submissions.

I have lots of use for them as well.



I have an old copy of OmniForm. version 5 ? Is that the best for making forms ?

[quote user="Jason"]

I have an old copy of OmniForm. version 5 ? Is that the best for making forms ?



[/quote]

Nuance/ScanSoft has elected to put most of their effort into OmniPage, and not promote OmniForm -- OmniForm 5 is the last version. I don't think OmniPage has the wizard that OCR's and auto-designs a form from a scanned form, although it does sophisticated OCR. OmniForm Deluxe saves to the proprietary .ofm format only, need OmniForm Premium to save to PDF.

Jerry are you able to create a short movie on how Omniform is able to scan a TIFF ( ? PDF as well ) and create the fields automatically?

Also, I was wondering what would happen if you moved the site you were hosting Cheyenne on ... would you have to edit all the pdfs' submit button?

Perhaps not .. the url for the submit button starts with "<</A<</F<</F(" and so it should be possible to use Cheyenne itself to read in all the pdfs, and change them to the new site!!

I will have to learn how to use Jing...I guess it's not too tough. The process of scanning in a TIFF to OmniForm is really easy, and the OmniForm "Form Assistant" wizard does show a visual of the TIFF being scanned.

On my synapse server, I made a new folder of c:\EMR\WebPortal, right along with c:\EMR\server and c:\EMR\client. I think if I used 127:0.0.1/EMR/WebPortal/www/pdfs for the submit location, that would work on any system with the same directory setup.

Hey, maybe we could have 2 submit buttons.... I noticed that Cute PDF Pro allows to make the submit button send PDF, XFDF, or FDF data. Make one button say "Submit data only" and another button for "Submit Whole PDF Form", which would then submit the entire PDF to the %/EMR/WebPortal/www/pdfs folder.

I don't think that will work. You can't have 2 Cheyenne servers running on the same PC - at present.

and it would be http://127.0.0.1:8000/pdfs ..... if it's in the www/pdfs directory ... not EMR/WebPortal/www/pdfs

remember ... www is the default root directory for the web server.

http://www.compkarori.co.nz:8000/pdfs/index.rsp

This script will list all the pdfs in the pdfs folder and the template variables you can use.I'll have to add it to the zip archive.

http://compkarori.co.nz:8090/Acroforms

start of some user documentation.

I'm sure Jerry will provide some followup, but he is now fully enabled with Acroforms.

I took him thru the process last night, and we created an acroform which he can use from the PWP ( Physician Web Portal ) and from the Synapse client.

New videos ...


Part 1 video - creating an Acroform using Acrobat Professional 9 which shows the other nuances needed to get them working with Synapse.


Part 2 video - some gotchas with Acrobat Pro, and registering the PDF with the Physician Web Portal

Part 3 video - using the just added Acroform with our demo patient

Part 4 video - using the new Acroform with the Synapse Client

A couple of points. Although Acrobat Pro can automatically create the fields, it gives some fields nasty long names. And renaming them in the tree on the left causes Acrobat to crash consistently, so you have to save your work regularly.

Also, the default distribution has a global variable myhost which points to the demo site. You need to change this to point to your site.

So, in the www/md/ directory, in the file app-init.r change the first function

so that the myhost points to your own site.

You will have to restart checmd.exe to recognize the changes.

Had a patient today that needed to fill out two PDFs ... ones I had missed preparing.

Only took me 10 mins afterwards to set them up for use with Synapse ... with Acrobat Professional doing most of the work.

[Y]