Is there really any question the PDF file format will be going away any time soon? Personally, I don't think so. And, neither should you. Adobe released their license to the technology in 2008 and it became an open standard for the world to use. Airlines use it for tickets, ticket companies use it for concerts and basically it's the digital equivalent of good old real-world paper for the digital world.

So what does this mean to you and your FileMaker database? Well, if you've got data within your database or you're capturing data in something like Web Direct, then knowing you can merge that data into a form fillable PDF can be invaluable. Especially if you need to put that data into a fixed format - like a PDF!

By running a server side script, and running some freely available software which is super fast an efficient, you can send out contracts, invoices, notices or even event tickets with merged in data from your FileMaker database.

Yes, you can certainly generate a PDF right from within FileMaker using your own data, but there are those situations where replicating an existing PDF just takes too much time. So just merge the data into a form fillable PDF. Plus, it just might be faster than generating it from within FileMaker!

Click the title or link to this article to view the video.

View the full article