History

Like many software products, FenForm began as a "quick fix" to enable us at Fenland Software to produce our business documents at various locations without having to keep stocks of pre-printed stationery at those locations.

Our initial intention was simply to emulate a dot matrix printer, as used for printing our documents, so the first version was very primitive. The paper size and all the typefaces were hard-coded into the program. It only recognized a small sub-set of print formatting commands. It had no colour functionality. Forms had to be designed by hand so had to be kept simple - just lines, boxes and text. It was possible, but extremely difficult, to add any graphics such as logos. Nevertheless, despite its simplicity, it did the job!

As time passed, some of our clients expressed an interest in using it too so we made various improvements to it. One of the first was to add a configuration file to allow the hard-coded configuration to be overridden. We also increased the range of commands it recognized and, later, added the ability to print barcodes. Even at this stage, however, form design was still a problem.

Current status

Early this year (2008), we decided to re-write the program to make it easier to use and maintain. FenForm now enjoys the status of an on-going project lead by our Technical Director. The source code of Version 2 is a lot easier to understand and has been structured to facilitate further enhancements.

A utility program ("makeform") creates a form file from a PDF file so you can now design your forms using your preferred editing program. We use OpenOffice.org which will directly export documents to PDF.

The Future

Several enhancements are already planned including -

• Produce PDF output
• Form specific typefaces
• Automatic form selection
• Multi-page (continuation sheet) forms
• Multiple forms per page
• Direct email transmission

We welcome any suggestions from users as to how FenForm can be improved.