Can I have a user submit a form and receive a PDF copy?

Question

Not quite sure how to ask this :) But what I need is to have some forms online that people can fill out, like registration form etc. They will then submit it and be emailed it as well as me and have it stored in a database. Is there a way for the files to be PDFs? Can I have an editable PDF form online? Thank you.

Answer 1

Can I have an editable PDF form online?

Not exactly -- but you can have a normal form (HTML served on HTTP), and in the server-side method that accepts POST requests, validate the user-supplied data, and if all is fine then generate a PDF on the fly and return it as the query's result, email it, store it, whatever.

Details all depend on yr server-side language (eg, if Python, you'd probably use ReportLabs' popular PDF-writing package -- but there are many server-side languages and I'm not likely to know the best solution for your own preferred one, statistically speaking;-). But the general concept isn't all that different in each server-side case, and I hope I've summarized it adequately in the previous paragraph;-).