[vox-tech] Pdf Viewers

[Micah J. Cowan]

On Fri, Mar 10, 2006 at 09:02:43AM -0800, Bob Scofield wrote:
> I just made a disappointing discovery.  I was playing around with a DMV form 
> and learned that with the Adobe Reader (in SuSE) I could type into the form.   
> But in Debian neither XPDF nor KPDF would let me type.  
> 
> So it seems that the open source readers are limited in ways that Adobe is 
> not.  I've read the KPDF Handbook, and there is no mentioned of typing into a 
> form.

Well, it's limited in a few other ways as well: The PDF format allows
you to embed movies, sounds, javascript, etc. I don't know for sure, but
I doubt xpdf supports any of those (and, IIRC, kpdf is a fork from
xpdf).

> So have I discovered a fact of life, or does someone know how to configure an 
> open source reader to type into a pdf document?

Probably a fact of life. I'm sure that AcroForms is an eventual goal,
but probably won't be coming for a while. You may need to resign
yourself to acroread. :-(

-- 
Micah J. Cowan
micah at cowan.name