Does your company's business process involve filling out PDF forms? Perhaps something like IRS Form W-4?

If so, you may be interested to learn that in addition to creating PDF documents from scratch, you can also use Visualforce and Apex to automate the process of populating third-party PDF forms. Ron Hess and I recently collaborated on a project that does just that. It's a straightforward process where all you really need to do is generate an XML file that follows Adobe's XFDF format.

If you're interested to learn more, we've documented an example that creates an XFDF file which is then used to populate a simple PDF form. Read the XFDF wiki article to learn more.