Offering a project to improve PDF form export in OpenOffice

[clemente]

The company where I work, openTrends, is offering a project to extend OpenOffice to have a better PDF form export.

Currently OpenOffice.org Writer can edit forms with buttons, check boxes, text fields and other elements. It can also export to PDF and these forms are still usable in viewers like Acrobat Reader or Evince. This exportation is however incomplete and not sufficient to produce „intelligent“ forms.

One particularly important feature we would like to add is AcroJS exporting.
AcroJS is JavaScript code inside the PDF which can do field validations and autocalculations. It is documented here: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/acrobat/pdfs/AcroJS.pdf
OpenOffice already supports assigning scripts to form events (for instance, do something when you click a button). They work inside OO.org, but are currently not exported.

openTrends is a rising company with experience in large projects and which offers -among others- tools and services around the PDF format.
There are other improvements we have considered to make OO.org a better PDF form editor; for instance, exporting more field properties or adding new field types which are now unavailable.

If there is interest on contracting a project to improve OpenOffice's PDF handling, please contact me anytime or post in this thread.

Daniel Clemente Laboreo
daniel.clemente@opentrends.net
openTrends Solucions i sistemes
http://www.opentrends.net/

[r4zoli]

This is the forum where users help user, no so much developers here.
I sent this post to dev at dba openoffice org mailing list, about your offer.
Best think to go OOo developers page.

[Frank Schönheit]

Daniel,

if you want to offer help in improving OOo's PDF capabilities in general, dev@openoffice.org would be the right place to speak up. For form/control related improvements, dev@dba.openoffice.org would be better, since form controls are part of the DBA project.

If you're looking for someone to pay your company for doing the improvements (and the word "contracting" suggests to me this might be the case), then I fear I do not know the right place . You probably would need to find users/customers willing to pay for the features you suggest, so users@openoffice.org might fit best.

Ciao
Frank

[clemente]

I filed a bug for the feature of AcroJS exporting.
http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=99412