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

[Rōnin Dusette]

You might be able to use PlayOnLinux to get a Windows app running under
Linux to take care of that. I can see that adobe acrobat has a silver
rating on appdb.winehq.org, so you could create a virtual drive for wine
through PlayOnLinux using wine 1.7.27, install atmlib through the Install
Components tab, and then install acrobat in there. It's worth a shot. I
personally have not tried to run that particular app through it, but it
should work.
On 4 Aug 2015 10:40 am, "Chris Jenks" <chris at jenks.us> wrote:

>
>   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
>>
>>
>>
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