I have a requirement from the boss. She’s used both OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office to produce forms that she can fill in electonically, print off and hand-out to parents. The forms are generally end-of-year reports which she creates electronically and posts out to parents. Both office suites suck for various reasons, most importantly because she says so. So we are looking for some solid software which will allow her to
- define a form structure,
- fill in the template structure,
- print off and look good.
Ideally the software would be Open-Source but because it’s to be used in a school the overriding concern is that it’s free-as-in-beer (I completely disagree, but you can see who wins the arguments round here). Dear lazyweb, does such a solution exist.
Hmm, I have setup templates for OpenOffice that match the very precise formatting for legislation, how much does your boss want ? Surely both Office suites do what you ask, and maybe it is more a setting up your templates properly?
Have you consider XForms in OpenOffice or some of the XForms editors out there?
It might sound like a stupid question, but can you give us
an example of what might be suitable?
I agree with Darragh, I am confident that both Office suites are capable of addressing the need, but I am not sure how to do fancy things with either of them.
Incidentally, if you could define a nice form in LaTeX, then it’d be piss easy to automate entire form generation (i.e.
foreach $student (%students)
{s/MATHS-SCORE/$mathscore/gi;}
I know its hardly ideal, but it seems like exactly the sort of solution that you would enjoy writing
Darragh,
I was talking to Michael Meeks and he figured out that most of my OO.o problems were to due with either (a) bugs that are now fixed or (b) Sun’s packaging of OO.o for Win32. So I think I’ll give OO.o another shot. If it dosn’t work I’ll go with des’s solution and write LaTeX to fix it.