G
Greg Guarino
Let me first apologize for the myriad bits of ignorance that are to
follow.
Our company does consulting work. We have found over the years that it
is best to have an agreement in writing, both to make sure all terms
are clear and to help deal with the small percentage of people who are
simply not honest.
We send them a PDF form to fill out (by hand, it needs a signature)
and send back to us. Depending on the job, certain things change,
notably the quoted price. Our consultant fields calls and emails from
out of the office. He wants to be able to refer people to a form on
the web that has the correct price already printed on it.
I found a script that allows us to give the client a password to
access the correct form. That works fine. But there are two problems:
We don't want non-clients, especially competitors, to read the form.
We understand that there is no 100% solution to that, but we don't
want search engines to be able to index the files easily. Toward that
end we have converted the forms to a "picture" and then printed them
as pdfs. Thus there is no text to index.
This "solution" has led to both of our problems. The files are quite
large (2.75Mb) and slow to load. In addition, coverting them to a
picture and then to pdf is a bit of a pain in the neck, especially
since there are about 20 different versions. Occasionally we feel the
need to change the form, which is a lot of work.
I would love to be able to find a different method. Perhaps some way
to insert a specified price into a blank spot on an otherwise defined
page. Or even better, a way to generate the proper pdf for each client
who logs in, but still leaving the text un-searchable.
Can anyone point us in the right direction?
Greg Guarino
follow.
Our company does consulting work. We have found over the years that it
is best to have an agreement in writing, both to make sure all terms
are clear and to help deal with the small percentage of people who are
simply not honest.
We send them a PDF form to fill out (by hand, it needs a signature)
and send back to us. Depending on the job, certain things change,
notably the quoted price. Our consultant fields calls and emails from
out of the office. He wants to be able to refer people to a form on
the web that has the correct price already printed on it.
I found a script that allows us to give the client a password to
access the correct form. That works fine. But there are two problems:
We don't want non-clients, especially competitors, to read the form.
We understand that there is no 100% solution to that, but we don't
want search engines to be able to index the files easily. Toward that
end we have converted the forms to a "picture" and then printed them
as pdfs. Thus there is no text to index.
This "solution" has led to both of our problems. The files are quite
large (2.75Mb) and slow to load. In addition, coverting them to a
picture and then to pdf is a bit of a pain in the neck, especially
since there are about 20 different versions. Occasionally we feel the
need to change the form, which is a lot of work.
I would love to be able to find a different method. Perhaps some way
to insert a specified price into a blank spot on an otherwise defined
page. Or even better, a way to generate the proper pdf for each client
who logs in, but still leaving the text un-searchable.
Can anyone point us in the right direction?
Greg Guarino