In our business we have an ongoing need to complete a wide selection of pre-printed contract documents with customer and financial transaction details. Unfortunately these documents have to be completed manually so creating electronic versions is not presently an option. As you may well understand this exercise is error prone and results in an unacceptable amount of rework. In order to assist staff and also improve documentation quality I have been thinking about scanning our pre-printed documents and then merging/layering the document images with the data we hold, so that data is positioned exactly where it's required on the document itself. This could then be viewed/printed as a pdf, etc. and used as a template for completion of the hard-copy. I have been researching how to best tackle this and in my cyberspace travels fortunately came across JasperReports :) I have not used iReport or JasperReports yet but have just read Heffelfinger's book 'JasperReports for Java Developers' and understand it is a straightforward exercise to precisely position data/textfields on a page, and that an image (read 'scanned document') can be used as a watermark. This would seem to handle my requirement, except a report can only have one watermark. As a set of contract documents could consist of several different pages would it be right for me to be thinking along the lines of creating a sub-report for each separate page, or am I trying to achieve something that Jasper is not designed to do? Comments/guidance from those more experienced will be welcome.
