I am working on digitizing the forms used in the hiring process at my place of employment. The requirements given to me by HR were to digitize the form on our Intranet while keeping it looking and functioning as close as possible to the paper version.
Design and layout, check.
Basic plain-text submission and validation, check.
My question is this: what is the community's take on delivery of this data formatted in such way that it can be printed off and kept in the employees personnel folder?
I don't want to send a huge HTML e-mail with tons of formatting as those messages could be large. A simple CSV won't work because it must be laid out and displayed as if it were a physical copy filled out by hand.
I thought about a PDF but would I really save space over an HTML e-mail? As it's internal I'm not worried about end users attempting to manipulate form data with malicious intent -- I check for all of that at submission time and strip out unwanted garbage. There's no sql backend, literally just the mail() to send it off to the respective departments.
Thoughts? What have you all used in the past, or are currently using that sends a minimal amount of data and overhead while fitting the requirements of being presented in the hard copy format?
