Paper Form Design Software

[Paul41]

My work is looking for some software to design paper forms with, and we are having trouble finding something. We are currently using Teleform which is OCR (optical character recognition) software. This software has a form designer that comes with it, but we want to try a new OCR system (Readsoft). Readsoft does not come with a designer so we are trying to find one. I would like to find something that is open source and will run on both Windows and Linux. Does anyone know of anything that I can look at?

[Bloodfen Razormaw]

Scribus can design PDF forms and runs on any major platform.

[Paul41]

Scribus can design PDF forms and runs on any major platform.

This looks nice, but it doesn't look like it has some features that I really need. I need to be able to create questions with bubbles so that the correct bubble can be filled in. I also need to be able to create constrained text areas (a line of side by side boxes where the user puts one letter per box). These are two features that greatly improve the OCR process so I really need them.

[Bloodfen Razormaw]

Scribus should be able to do both of those. Actions and constraints on forms can be scripted in any arbitrary way. And bubbles can be done, but you will need images for the empty and filled bubbles.

[Paul41]

I took a closer look at Scribus and it could probably do what we need but it wouldn't be straightforward and easy. We are thinking about looking at the code to see if we could modify it to do exactly what we want. Either way I have some other needs where Scribus will be helpful. I appreciate the suggestion.