Hi, thank you !
Well I've been asked to try to do it because that's what the users want. There's already a feature from a software in my company that exists, it's a form in sharepoint that looks like the document and that is generated as a Word or PDF document then.
At first the users wanted a new version of the software to be able to change the document (background, styles, position of forms...) but it seems pretty difficult to do that in sharepoint (so they say, sharepoint is not one of my skills). So I'm being asked to make a proof of concept in
Java because it's the main langage we use, but even if reading the document is pretty hard, it's possible, same for the styles.
I've found something I can possibly work with, it's called content control, it's a sort of tag that can be named and when the document is locked it disappears and looks like a field so it seems that I may be able to use this. Now I need to be able to retrieve the specific fields with POI apache, but it's not that easy. If I succeed I'll probably be able to meet their requierements, else they'll find another sharepoint solution.
As for your proposal, well if it was possible I'm sure they wouldn't matter but I'm not even sure if reading in PDF is possible, and the problem with Excel is that we don't want the users to mess with the fields too much, else the software won't be able to read it properly. The advantage with word is that by locking the document they'll be able to only edit the forms and won't mess with the document itself.
Well I'm stuck with this for now, I'll try my best with content controls for now, but I'm still open to other solutions.