[vox-tech] Advice for dealing with adobe pdf forms etc on linux?

[Carl Boettiger]

Hi folks,

I occasionally have to deal with Adobe pdf documents that have embedded
forms at work and am looking for some suggestions on how to manage this on
a Linux platform.

Sometimes the files are just plain pdfs, and I can happily mark up on top
of them with an editor like Xournal and export my marked-up pdf.

When the document has embedded forms that already have some content entered
into them (e.g. by another user on a Windows/mac platform), that content
does not display in evince.  I can get it to display using okular, but
cannot print it from okular to a pdf output without losing the contents of
the form.

It appears that Adobe no longer provides support for a linux version of
acroread.  I can get older versions of acroread binaries to install and run
just fine, but any attembpt I've made to print the output (e.g. print to
file, or  using CUPS pdf printer device) results in either a blank pdf or
ps, or worse a document that causes any editor to segfault it when I try
and open it.

My current strategy has been to take a screenshot of the pdf; crop convert
the png back to pdf (say, in gimp), and mark it up in xournal.  Needless to
say, this isn't ideal.

Any suggestions on how to better handle this situation?


Somewhat worse than the 'ordinary' pdf forms are pdfs that have XFA-based
forms.  Opening these under evince or okular just shows the text: "Please
wait...
If this message is not eventually replaced by the proper contents of the
document, your PDF viewer may not be able to display this type of
document."   While these do open properly and can be edited in the dated
linux binaries of acroread, I haven't found any open source editor that can
handle them.  (It seems there are good reasons for that, as their may be
security issues etc with this format, but I don't get to choose that).  Any
way to deal with these?  (Even an online tool would be a reasonable
alternative I guess).

Thanks!

Carl
-- 

http://carlboettiger.info
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