Many Governments and businesses around the world depend on PDF Forms designed for Acrobat PDF reader. A while back I was trying to fill out a form called i-864 by USCIS (part of U.S department of Homeland security). I noticed a very interesting feature that is meant
to get rid of all the manual data entry errors that might arise out of entering data manually from a paper document over to a computer information system.
As illustrated in Figure 1, the barcode on the bottom of the page changes as you type into each field.
This is useful on multiple dimensions, first it helps the Data Entry to be done by a simple system of Scanning the 2-d Barcode rather than re-entering data
manually. Secondly on government forms when you enter non ASCII characters such as Chinese, Arabic or Korean the Data Entry Professional will not be
stumped by unfamiliar character set. All of this is very
nice but Barcode enabled PDF Documents by Adobe Acrobat Reader is actually too late to the market. That’s because most Large Enterprises now rely on
customers to perform the Data Entry Online and Then Perhaps Print an automatically generated pdf file that has a barcode embedded on it. But Acrobat
Reader’s 2d Barcodes can still be useful for small businesses and governments around the world that might be interested in long forms that can be filled
offline without persistent access to a reliable internet connection.
Figure 1: USCIS Form i-864 is a showcase for Adobe’s 2D Barcode Technology.
