The past few days have been quite a challenge and I've shot myself in the foot enough to show for it.
Challenge of the week: Fill in a PDF file with data from a database... Now I know there is such a thing as fields (to which I will come later). There were several angles I investigated first. My first step was to succesfully generate a PDF. I used HTML::HTMLDoc (which is basically a wrapper for a shell call) to generate a basic listing of customer data. The next step was filling in data in an already existing PDF. In the hurry, I overlooked the field feature in PDF::Reuse and starting hacking a bit in HTML, trying to recreate the layout of the existing PDF. Needless to say, I sucked miserably. After some swearing, cursing, quick hacking (including taking the PS step), I eventually turned to PDF Fields with some libraries (including Perl modules) Adobe provides (in return for your soul) to do FDF modification. This was not exactly what I needed. At this time, it was about 1 AM. I still wanted to stay with fields and check which modules supported them. I thank Lars Lundberg for writing the module and allowing a tired techie to get some sleep at 2 AM.
