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Celull0yd
Celull0yd
Inspiring
May 18, 2021
Answered

Automatically Create Book from Submitted Fillable PDFs

  • May 18, 2021
  • 1 reply
  • 724 views

Community,

 

I'm sure this question is much more complicated than the usual Acrobat question...

 

I'd like to be able to email a fillable PDF to each member of a group and then have the returned PDFs automatically combined into a multi-page PDF that can be searched. For example, one of the categories will be for "areas of expertise." I'd like to have the members of the group have the ability to search a single file (multi-page PDF) for, say, "welding," and get the results so they can hire a welder. It's not a large grooup of people (maybe 40-50) so I'm trying to keep it simple. This can probably be accomplished by creating a website with the results being stored in a database, but I'd like the less tech savvy members to be able to print out the form and fill it in (then I can scan in the form, convert it using OCR, and add it to the main book).

 

I'm on a Mac and will be creating the fillable PDF in InDesign.

 

Maybe someone knows of a better way to accomplish this, or if there's no way to accomplish it automaticall. I can always combine the submitted PDFs manually but I'm trying to have it done automatically.

 

Thanks,

Lloyd

This topic has been closed for replies.
Correct answer try67

You can simply merge the files they send you back, and if they are named after the name of the person then it will automatically create those bookmarks for you. To do that you could use an Action, which will read the name of the person from the file (assuming it's located in a field), flatten the form fields (so that they don't overwrite each other when merged later on) and then save the file using that name. Then you take those newly created files and simply merge them manually in Acrobat to get the final result.

1 reply

try67
Community Expert
try67Community ExpertCorrect answer
Community Expert
May 18, 2021

You can simply merge the files they send you back, and if they are named after the name of the person then it will automatically create those bookmarks for you. To do that you could use an Action, which will read the name of the person from the file (assuming it's located in a field), flatten the form fields (so that they don't overwrite each other when merged later on) and then save the file using that name. Then you take those newly created files and simply merge them manually in Acrobat to get the final result.

    Celull0yd
    Celull0ydAuthor
    Inspiring
    May 18, 2021

    try67,

     

    Thanks for the reply. I figured there would bew some manual work needing to be done, but that's not a lot.

     

    I'll give that a try...

     

    Lloyd

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