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

[Chris Jenks]

   Dear Carl,

   I recently searched for a (free) PDF editor for linux to deal with the 
situations you describe but couldn't find anything adequate. As I remember 
there was at least one commercial linux application that looked like it 
might work but I wasn't willing to buy it (I see a few listed for sale at 
this time).

   What I ended up doing was opening the documents in Acrobat on Windows 
and printing them to PDF. The read-only PDF files can then be read and 
printed from Linux. Of course this isn't a Linux-only solution, and what 
I don't like about it is that I can't edit my own PDF documents without 
going to Windows.

   Yours,

     Chris

On Tue, 4 Aug 2015, Carl Boettiger wrote:

> 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
> 
> 
>