PDF form to text in the body of an email

[dianab25366789]

This is the scenario I have been given (I'm pretty sure you can't but I've been asked to research the possibility)

I download a fillable PDF form. I fill out the form and press the submit button to a specific email address. The person who receives the email it does not get the PDF form as an attachment but instead gets a regular text email with no attachment in which the content of the filled PDF is now the body of the email in text form.

Is this at all possible?

[try67]

Depends. What application is going to be used by the user to do it, and how long is the text you want to include as the message body?

[dianab25366789]

That's my question. I think we're using adobe acrobat to make the form fillable. It also would be 2 pages long or so. We don't want to the people downloading and using the PDF to have to download additional software on their end to make it happen, preferably we'd rather download something on our end that makes the PDF's we receive into text format in the body of an email. We currently have Microsoft outlook as our email system. 

[try67]

If you want the email itself to only contain text then what's important is what the user​ will be using, not what you have... Unless they also have Acrobat, it's not possible.

[try67]

You should consider using alternatives to email for this. For example, you can submit the form data to a web-service, which in turn can send it in a plain-text email, or save it as a local file on the server, or insert the data into a database, etc.

That would be a much more transparent process for the user (basically just clicking a button and waiting for a moment), and you can even return to them a message saying that the data was received successfully.

[NKOWA555]

You could inject all the field values into a email message body using a script:

Visit the following website to help you create the script for the button:

fdftoolkit.net/email-pdf-mailto-generator.aspx

Note: When using the above tool, just use the field name enclosed in braces { } in the message body and it will generate the appropriate code.

For example: {Fieldname_01}

Example Script:

//Place this script in the buttons mouseUp JavaScript event  
//http://www.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/devnet/acrobat/pdfs/js_api_reference.pdf#page=345  
//SUBMIT PDF FORMAT WITH ADOBE READER  
var url = "mailto:you@domain.com?subject=Message Subject Text&body=See attached file...\nField 1: " +  encodeURIComponent(this.getField("Fieldname_001").value) + "\nField 2: " +  encodeURIComponent(this.getField("Fieldname_002").value) + "\nField 3: " +  encodeURIComponent(this.getField("Fieldname_003").value) + "\nField 4: " +  encodeURIComponent(this.getField("Fieldname_004").value) + "&cc=&bcc=";  
var submitAs = "PDF";//PDF,FDF,XFDF,XDP,XML  
this.submitForm({cURL:url,cSubmitAs:submitAs});  

[try67]

There's a character limit to using this method, though.