Last night God came in my dream. Irritability was clear on his face. Perhaps he was tensed of something.
So, here the conversation follows.

Me : Hello God, how are you? Long time, no see. Where have you been for so long?

God : (Angrily) If you can see that I am not OK, then what’s the purpose of asking, how am I?

Me : Come on, This is the demeanour of we software people, even if we have screwed something. By the way, what happened?

God : There is no limit for the covetousness of you human-beings. I have written the codes for life so well, but instead of using it as per the user manual (which you never follow ) you have started customizing the codes. But as expected, you are not aware of life’s JavaScript validations..So you are throwing un-handled exceptions,errors and not to mention the warnings. As usual you don’t care about the warnings as along as the program executes.

Me : It seems the best programmer of the universe now thinking of following the coding guidelines and standards developed my human beings.

God : Please stop your sarcasm, will you?

Me: Ok Ok,,Calm down. Would you please care to explain the issue a bit ?

God : See, I gave you everything..Life, the materials to sustain life. But you exploited everything..As a result you are facing the warnings of Tsunami, Droughts, Increasing temperature of earth, melting of glaciers etc. Still you do not care for warnings. You are waiting for the whole system to hang. And even I do not know how to handle those.

Me : It seems you have not upgraded the Life’s version and it’s code. Come on, how can the best programmer forget about the maintenance phase.

God : Yes, But your specs for it changes every sec. How can I do with that?

Me : I guess you are pointing towards the deforestation issue which is the root cause of all these problems.

God : You guessed it right. This is the quality I like about you people..Intelligence !!!. But as you know, the old saying goes : Too much of anything is bad.

Me : I guess we waste a lot of papers by taking printouts of something, some applications..etc.

God : Yes, But how can I stop that or minimise that?

Me : I can help you with that. Which makes the process simpler, easy to use and effective also. By the way have you heard of the word : PDF ?

God : Let me think..No, I don’t know. What’s that?

Me : Hmmm.. It shows that you are not upgrading your skills, remember that dialogue : “Life is a race”. If you do not upgrade your skill you will lag behind and so as we.

God : Instead of drifting away from the topic, explain what you want to tell.

Me : Ok.It’s the abbreviation of Portable Document Format. It’s easy to use. If we can use it sensibly we can minimize a lot of wastage of papers.

God : How?

Me : It’s very simple. By the way have you ever visited any government clerk’s chamber? Have you thrown a look at those stacks and stacks of dust covered files?

God : Yes, Those are the applications which people fill up using pen, then it comes to the clerk by post or by any other means. Then he processes those and it’s a very tedious job. Sometimes he searches the file which he rarely gets. Not only the govt offices but also many software organizations use it to send offer letters, confirmation letters which the candidates take printout and fill it up. But recently when you people are busy in filing your income tax return I found a strange looking thing which looks like a form.

Me : Exactly !!! That is a PDF form. We can use PDF forms to make the process simpler. A PDF form is a simple electronic form which has certain fields like TextFields, RadioButtons, CheckBoxes..etc. We can fill it electronically i.e by the use of keyboard.

God : The same you can do with any online forms which has developed in any other languages.

Me : PDF form has it’s own set of advantages.

1. These forms are quite simple, no flashy contents (Though we can always add), even disabled persons can use it as it has accessibility features.
2. We can customize these forms as per our need. We can add dyanmically pages, contents, rows as per our need instead of making a huge table we can modify it.
3. We can add barcodes whether it’s static or dynamic.
4. We can open this in a browser and through Adobe Reader and Acrobat.
5.These forms talk in a simple language which is XML. As we know it’s  a universal language.
6.The best thing about PDF forms is you do not need to be connected to the internet all the time. You can simply download it, fill it up. Save it, if you forget some information in the middle. You just need the access to internet for a second only when you click the submit button.

God : WOW !!! That’s brilliant. But can we attach these to an e-mail?

Me : Absolutely !! You do not need to open your e-mail client specifically for it, all you just need to click the submit button it will automatically attach it to the e-mail. Even we can customize the subject line as per our need.

God : Hmm, but what about the security?

Me : These forms are secured forms. We can set various level of security.

1. We can have field level security which gives access only to authorized persons.
2. We can add document level security.
3. We can also add security for the content, editing of the form.

God : So how can we design/develop these kind of forms?

Me : We can use Acrobat as well as LiveCycle to develop these forms.We can also customize it by adding JavaScripts. See how JavaScript came to rescue.

God : Hmm..Now I am feeling bit relaxed. Definitely we can make life simpler and save our Trees. But why do people still feel that PDF is just as reading stuff downloadable from internet.

Me : Come on, The best programmer was un-aware of it. However, people are still busy with the age old practices. They also need to know what’s happening in the technical world without being a toad which is happy in its small well.

God : You talk a lot. Do you know how to develop these kind of forms?

Me : Of course, We at MindFire develop these kind of forms, and to add we had also developed few forms which has high technical complexity.

God : Then that’s great..All the best to your organization.

Me : Thank you God !!! And please update your skills regularly.

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