How to generate application forms/documents programmatically?

At the moment, we use MS WORD and MS EXCEL to mail merge documents that needs to be sent to multiple recepients.

For example, say there is a complaint form where the complainant needs to fill in his/her name, address, etc. So we have a .doc file set up with the content and the dynamic entities set up for mail merging, with the name and address details put in 开发者_开发问答an excel file, from where we can happily mail merge to generate all or just the necessary forms/documents.

However, I would like to automate this process, like a form in a website where the complainant can fill in his/her name, address and other details, and we could use that to generate the complaint form automatically and offer it to be downloaded (preferrably as a pdf).

Now, the only solution that comes to mind, is Latex, so that I can just replace the needed entities and just compile to PDF. However, that bit has to be negotiated with the webhost, if they are offering Latex or not.

Is there any other solution? Any other way we could get this done, with something that shouldn't be a problem for most webhosting solutions to offer?

EDIT: I would prefer a non .NET or rather non microsoft solution since, the servers are running linux and while mono might be capable of getting the job done, none of our devs know any .NET languages. However, if required we might have to dwelve into it.

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Generating PDF using an XSL. Check the following: Apoc XSL-FO

You will need to create an XML file with the required fields and transform that with this tool.

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If you wish to avoid .NET then XSL-FO is worth a look. Try the FOray project. XSLT can be a steep learn if you do not have experience already. Also users will not be able to change the templates without asking the XSLT guru to do it.

If your templates are already in MS Word and MS Excel then I would stick with generating MS docs on the server. These are now easy to work with from code since OpenXML - check out OfficeOpenXML and OpenXMLDeveloper

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Apache FOP : http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/

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I suggest generating rtf on the server: it's easy enough to automatically generate using cpan's RTF::Writer, has converters generating good pdf, can be edited by hand in word, oo-writer & TextEdit, doesn't have any really bad compatibility issues between the main editing applications, and has decent text & resource extraction tools, with text extraction being rather better than pdf.

There's some support for moving between rtf & latex, although the best rtf -> latex converter, docx2tex, depends on the System.IO.Packaging .net module, whose mono implementation isn't yet rock solid.

Postscript — Not a recommendation: it's too much of an unwieldy sledgehammer for this job, but iText will generate the pdf directly from the form data. If you wanted to do fancy things like signed pdf, that would be the way to go.

Postscript #2 — If you break up the Word document into individual files using word's master document representation, then you can clobber one of the parts with hand-generated content. This makes it easy to do something approximating form-filling on word .doc files using just standard file-utils and some trivial rtf->doc tweaking.