Options for creating forms, distributing them and collecting info
So you have a requirement to NOT use a website for this? That's strange. But PDF forms is OK? And it's potentially a large amount of people? You realize the only way to collect that data is that people fill in the PDF form, save it and e-mail it.
Or well, a lot of people will print the form out and send it by snail mail of course. In which case you might want to just send out the forms in paper in the first place. Nothing wrong with that, but you'll have to hire people to type all the forms in.
Although it is perfectly possible to save all the incoming PDF's in a directory (but be careful to not save duplicates or overwrite anything, so good luck in keeping track of that) and then extract the data from the PDF's, it's really better to have some sort of application that does this. Of course you could make an EXE file and send out, but then what about OS X and Linux users?
No, make an application. But make it web-based. And yeah, that means HTML forms, and if your boss says "no" to that, then explain to him why he is wrong. It's really the only sane way.
If you fail, then make the HTML forms very dynamic with Javascript, and call the "Ajax forms" instead. It will be 99% likely to fool whoever came up with that strange requirement. :-)
What options do I have for creating a form intended for collecting data from a potentially big amount of people? (Preferably in Python)
I am looking for options other than HTML forms.
PDF Forms seem to be an option, but my tendency until now has been to avoid them.
Standard desktop app seems to be the way to go, but it means a new application has to be installed on each computer that wants to fill the form.
It could be a standalone executable that does not need installation.
If you want to collect this info, you need to provide some means of saving the data into some file and then some way to import that info into another tool that does the data collection and analysis.
I feel like I am reinventing the wheel.
Isn't there some other way of doing this type of job?
Regards