Printable form, How do I make a for suitable for printing, NOT submission? Options

[Dave Garzoli]

I am the webmaster for www.ukiahspeedway.com- a rather simple HTML site (My webdesign skills are pretty primitive at best.) It is a racing website and I want to be able to allow racers to generate a race class sign up form, print it out, sign it and bring it with them to the track. Currently I have individual .pdfs up for every class we offer, but this means the racers have to fill them out with a pen, usually illegibley.

See example: http://www.ukiahspeedway.com/forms/mx_form...forms/85BEG.pdf

I created a form using frontpage with all the above options except the two blank pre printed signature lines like in the above .pdf that could be filled out online. See here: http://www.ukiahspeedway.com/f37/index.htm

Problem. Upon submission, rather than email a form somewhere, I need it to generate a form like the .pdf above so the user can just print it out, sign it and bring it with them to the race. Can this be done with simple html? Currently the site is on a unix server with no front page extensions. I know it can be done in .asp, but I am not too familiar with it and I know it requires front page extenstions..............

Any help here would be greatly appreciated!

This post has been edited by Dave Garzoli: May 1 2007, 01:41 PM

[Darin McGrew]

Upon submission, rather than email a form somewhere, I need it to generate a form like the .pdf above so the user can just print it out, sign it and bring it with them to the race. Can this be done with simple html?

Simple HTML cannot "do" anything. It's just a markup language, a data format.

A server-side program could take the form data and return a PDF document. With PHP, it looks like this SourceForge project might help. With Perl, this module might help.

[Christian J]

Why make a PDF file? The user could just print the FORM page after filling in the details (without submitting it, in which case the SUBMIT button and server-side script becomes unnecessary). Won't all browsers print the user input? Or you could generate an HTML confirmation page that could be printed (which is probably simpler to do than making a PDF).

[Darin McGrew]

Or you could generate an HTML confirmation page that could be printed (which is probably simpler to do than making a PDF).

Ah, good point. Ecommerce sites show printable receipt/confirmation pages that include much of the information the customer entered, but it isn't PDF.

PDF is only needed if the exact layout of the form must be preserved. My guess is that a lot of this is driven by the insurance companies, so whatever their requirements are, you'll need to comply with them.

[Dave Garzoli]

Or you could generate an HTML confirmation page that could be printed (which is probably simpler to do than making a PDF).

Ah, good point. Ecommerce sites show printable receipt/confirmation pages that include much of the information the customer entered, but it isn't PDF.

PDF is only needed if the exact layout of the form must be preserved. My guess is that a lot of this is driven by the insurance companies, so whatever their requirements are, you'll need to comply with them.

No PDF is needed, I just used that as an illustration to show you what the resulting document should look like. Any plain ole text document that is formatted something like that will suit me just fine. The HTML confirmaiton page idea would likely work fine, if I knew how to do it!

[Darin McGrew]

Please see the FAQ entry How do I use forms?

[Christian J]

Is there anything stopping you from just using INPUT text fields without an actual form, and just print that? In that case I see no need for submitting any form.