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

[Bob Scofield]

I purchased the business edition of PDF Studio:

http://www.qoppa.com/

There's a version for Linux and one for Windows and Mac.

It's my default pdf program and I like it, but I have to admit that 
Windows Foxit is better.  I've seen Foxit OCR material that PDF Studio 
cannot.

The reason that I purchased a commercial program is that I plan to take 
Windows off my computers when Windows 9 expires in 2019, and I'm 
experimenting with using Linux in my business.  PDF Studio is one step 
in that direction.

Bob




On 08/04/2015 10:56 AM, Chris Jenks 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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