Lets say you had some sort of report written in crystal and your users accessed this report through terminal services. So first things first, you want to allow your users to print this report out as a PDF. (It’s possible that print to PDF is a feature of a new version of crystal, but this version doesn’t have it). So first off you should install the really nice open source PDFCreator program. To install onto a terminal server make sure to use the CHANGE USER /INSTALL before and CHANGE USER /EXECUTE after.

Ok, so now our user has a PDF of their report but maybe now that want to annotate it or circle something. As I mentioned in this post how to escape Adobe tyranny I really like using the free, but not open source :(, PDF-XCHANGE VIEWER  (FREE)

So once again install this into terminal server using the Change User commands, and make it the default PDF viewer. Now when users print to PDF they can select the ‘open with the default viewer checkbox’ and make any annotations that they desire.

Ok, now what if your user wants to add a digital signature to the PDF. (Assuming they already have a digital certificate) I wrote about this a bit on my other blog mellerbeck tech
But in my case I wanted a little bit of flexibility so I modified the source from http://www.codeproject.com/KB/aspnet/Esignature.aspx

and created my own version of a PDF signing app. There ya go, a small PDF workflow, and free to boot. Anybody else have any recipes to share with me?