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

Wed Aug 5 12:01:59 PDT 2015

Thanks everyone for the suggestions.  It looks to me like qoappa's
commercial PDF Studio is the best option for me to handle pdf documents
with proprietary features/standards.

On Tue, Aug 4, 2015 at 3:42 PM Mark's tech help <markindavis at hush.com>
wrote:

> Interesting topic.  Motivated me to read around for awhile, and what seems
> to have most potential is DjVuLibre:
>
> (from http://djvu.sourceforge.net/gsdjvu.html )
>      "DjVu documents download and display extremely quickly, and look
> exactly the same on all platforms with no compatibility problems due to
> fonts, colors, etc. DjVu can be seen as a superior alternative to PDF and
> PostScript for digital documents, to TIFF (and PDF) for scanned bitonal
> documents, to JPEG and JPEG2000 for photographs and pictures, and to GIF
> for large palettized images. DjVu is the only Web format that is practical
> for distributing high-resolution scanned documents in color. No other
> format comes close. "
>
> There's a snag though, in that there's apparently a conflict between the
> "Common Public License" (http://www.eclipse.org/legal/cpl-v10.html) and
> the GPL, under which different sub-parts are written..  upshot being that
> executables (binaries) are not considered redsitributable.  The Ghostscript
> driver that enables PDF importing, called GSDjVu, seems the sticky
> licensing issue..
>
> (from http://djvu.sourceforge.net/gsdjvu.html )
>      "If you are determined to compile GSDjVu, you will find much easier
> to use the improved version prepared by the DjVuLibre team (after all, we
> wrote this code in the first place.) "
>
> I've compiled quite a few packages in my time, but am not top-salary grade
> in this area.  Nonetheless, I hereby put myself out there as for-hire, to
> set about implementing this in your environment.
> But it sounds like this should present a quality Linux alternative.  I'm
> presuming it's plenty easy to port back out to .pdf format when desired..
> though I haven't test-driven it yet.
> The software project overall sounds like the way go for someone such as
> myself, who's working to migrte away from the likes of Adobe entirely.  And
> kudos on the foresight of planning to leave the Windows platform, Bob!
>
> Another up & coming possibility is something called poppler, the TODO of
> which says it'll be taking on pdf annotation:
> "glib frontend to:
>         - Sound/Movie actions support
>         - API to create annotations  "
>
> (from  http://cgit.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler/tree/TODO )  Just
> noticed on the Okular page, that this is a back-end of theirs!
>
>
> And as for getting form entries to print from Okular, which had been
> entered in from other machines..  just maybe this commenter was onto
> something:
>      "FontForge - particularly useful if someone sends you a MAC pdf & you
> need to edit it ;o) "
>
> ( from
> http://tuxradar.com/content/best-linux-applications-office-productivity )
>
>
> Carl:  on the Okular FAQ page, there's repeated mention of when one needs
> to have upgraded versions of Poppler installed, so you might check that.
>
>
> Best of luck,
>   Mark
>
>
> --
> https://twitter.com/linuxusergroup/followers
>
> On 8/5/2015 at 2:35 AM, "Bob Scofield" <scofield at omsoft.com> wrote:
> >
> >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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>
> --
> Shell programming is a 1950's jukebox - great if it has your song
> already.  --Larry Wall
>
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-- 

http://carlboettiger.info
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