Show HN: Paperstencil – cross between word processor and web form | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Paperstencil – cross between word processor and web form

github.com

72 pointsselvan17 comments

Interesting concept. At our company we use MachForm (http://www.appnitro.com/)

It really is a php clone (but more powerful) of WUFOO (http://www.wufoo.com/) but no subscription needed.

Interesting, it's definitely a competitor to SharePoint if coupled with other services. There is just something about the graphics that makes me feel it's dated unfortunately. And apparently vulnerable to Heartbleed.

Will certainly improve UI graphics & icons at the earliest..Will check for heartbleed vulnerability immediately.

heartbleed vulnerability is gone. Have fixed it.

Congratulations! This is the best implementation of narrative form builder I have seen. And, it is admirable that you are releasing the code for your service with Apache license.

We (JotForm) tried to do one on an internal hackathon ( http://www.jotform.com/narrative-forms/ ) but it didn't work really well and we didn't receive much excitement from our users about it. So, we didn't develop it further. But, I've always found narrative forms amazing. I wonder why more sites are not using it.

Maybe something to replace the deprecated Microsoft InfoPath form services on SharePoint server.

If one can write "form rules" in JavaScript or like InfoPath in a graphical rule language, that would be awesome.

Looks good. I love the concept. I have couple of questions:

Is it possible to create lookup tables which then can be used in the form for data input? For e.g. Contacts: that get populated from my address book table? etc ...

Also is there a workflow process in the pipeline?

Good work!

Code shall be easily extended to accommodate these features. Shoot an email to selvan@bitstat.com, will help you on that.

This looks handy, I might use this as a part of a super-side project to get my 73yo relative to stop creating exams using MS Word. (Years and years of exams/tests, locked up inside zillions of MS Word files!)

Can this handle nested conditional forms?

It doesn't have support for nested forms.

I've got to recommend SaaS Formstack (http://www.formstack.com)

- All the correct security procedures are taken care of by them plus there team is extremely responsive.

Overall design of product is not very good. Also, you should probably not use the word "Render" for a consumer app; maybe "Publish" or "View"?

it is our early release of the product (More focus was on the functionality). We will improve look and feel (such as icons, theme, etc) in general in our next iteration.

This looks great! It would look better if the font wasn't monospaced (if you're looking for suggestions, I love the free Google font "Oxygen").

I think that serif font looks bad. Especially when it's small like in the footer.

looks good!

Is there some functionality to save and resume later (from end-customer perspective)? Would be nice if I could give out unique URLs to a form, which then autosave anything entered there.

A datepicker seems missing.

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