[reportlab-users] question about pagecatcher pricing

[Jerome Alet]

Hi,

Forgive me in advance if this is not the correct address 
to send this message, but I thought other people may be
intested by your answer, too...

I've searched your website to find information about pagecatcher
pricing, outside of the ReportLab Enterprise Solutions package.
This is for a one/two days job so Enterprise Solutions pricing
is not an option.

I know I saw it before but I can't find it again. Is it still
possible to obtain pagecatcher separately ?

Also the "Certified Developer Network" link gives a 404 (Not found)
so I can't learn if I may apply.

I'd be particularly interested in knowing if the following is possible :

      - I want to reuse an existing PDF document which was meant
        to be filled-in with a pen, but fill it with Reportlab
        instead. PageCatcher seems to do this.
        
      - This is to put on a website, hosted on a shared server
        (probably >100 virtual servers) that I don't control
        (I'm not root, and can't install at-will) : a CGI
        script would take HTML form fields as input and write
        them onto the original document, using PageCatcher or
        datas extracted with PageCatcher (see below).
        Core ReporLab is installed, but old.
        
      - So the question is : do I have to install PageCatcher
        on the ISP's server, or can I extract datas from
        the original PDF document using PageCatcher at home
        once and for all, and then put this extracted data
        on the ISP's server (as a Python Pickle for example).
        If this is possible, then the per server per CPU
        license would surely apply to my own single CPU machine 
        at home, instead of the ISP's one (multi-CPU machine) ;-)
        
Could you explain if PageCatcher "only" extracts the datas from the 
PDF document, and then you can reuse these datas later without 
PageCatcher, or if PageCatcher is necessary both for data extraction 
and reuse ? It seems that the restoreForms() API does the import 
job, but I don't find this method in RL's sources. Is this method 
part of PageCatcher ? I think the best (IMHO) would be for 
storeForms() to be part of PageCatcher and restoreForms() to be part 
of the core API. 

If reusing pagecatcher extracted data without needing PageCatcher
is possible, then do you plan to offer the extraction service on
a per-page price, i.e. I send you a PDF document, you send
me the extracted data for later use with core RL, and I pay
you a certain amount of money per extracted page (or data size,
or whatever) ? 

I may not be able to afford PageCatcher yet, especially for this small
project, but I'd be more than willing to pay for the data extraction 
service if reasonably priced. Considering that this time I've only
got one page to extract, this may not be interesting for you to 
even consider offering such a service, though, but maybe other 
people there share this sort of need.

Thanks in advance for any answer. (feel free to answer privately if 
this is the wrong place for this) 

PS : the mailing list address at the end of PageCatchIntro.html is 
wrong.

Jerome Alet