[DUG] Software and how to go forward

[Jolyon Direnko-Smith]

Hi Wallace,

First I find it interesting that a PDF is filled in but then posted.  Did
you mean emailed ?  Or is there a paper form involved ?

If it's a paper form then some sort of OCR solution might be feasible; if
it's an emailed PDF form then if it is an actual "form" then there is
presumably a PDF forms API you might be able to use to extract the
information.

Robo's idea is potentially a good one. Although instead of/as well as a web
page for them to provide membership details, have you thought about a
mobile app ?  It strikes me that the social/community dimension of clubs
with events etc would be ideally suited to some sort of mobile app.


In terms of simply streamlining the data processing you have currently, a
lot will come down to the scale of the problem and whether the effort in
implementing, deploying and maintaining any solution would be recouped in
the saved effort of keying the data received currently.  You call this
"Dark ages", but one of the biggest problems afflicting the software
development industry is a perpetual perception of a need to change just for
the sake of being "new".


If homes were built in the same way as software we would knock down
perfectly good homes every few years just because the tools used to build
them are now a few years old, regardless of the state of the buildings
themselves.

On 2 December 2015 at 22:59, Marshland Engineering <
marshland at marshland.co.nz> wrote:

> I have written a program using Delphi and MySQL to keep track of our club
> members, subs, events that they take part in etc etc, however, at some
> events,
> we need a lot of info and each entrant needs to fill out 20 or so fields of
> data and pay some money.
>
> Currently they fill in a PDF form and post it to us. (Dark ages) Needless
> to
> say this is hugely time consuming. What is the easiest and reasonably
> comprehensive way to go ? Looks like I'm in for learning a new language
> here.
>
> Thanks Wallace.
>
>
>
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