Can someone answer that ?
-------- Original Message -------- Subject: PDF forms Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2011 16:28:05 +0100 From: Rikard Fröberg rfroberg@gmail.com To: feedback@pdfreaders.org
Hello!
I'm curious about what your views are on PDFs with forms?
In Sweden, where I live, authorities increasingly offer application forms in the format of an editable PDF with forms (javascript-based, I think) to the citizens.
Problem is, eventhough they offer PDF (which is better than many other editable formats ;-) ), they offer PDFs which, due to the form and editableness only open correctly in Adobe Reader :(
An example of such a PDF can be found here, at the Swedish Police:
http://polisen.se/Vastra_Gotaland/sv/Service/Blanketter/Tillstand/Vanliga-bl...
I've found no free software able to open it other than displaying:
"To view the full contents of this document, you need a later version of the PDF viewer. You can upgrade to the latest version of Adobe Reader from www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html For further support, go to www.adobe.com/support/products/acrreader.html"
and the tools I've tried so far include various transformation software, so the lack of support for PDF forms seems to be within the PDF libs available, and not only in different GUI applications.
No on-line tool that I tried has worked either (including Adobes own on-line reader) - all either complain about the file being a PDF form, or simply displaying the note to upgrade to the latest version of Adobe Reader.
Do you know of any piece of free software that is able to open such PDF files? Being able to edit and save the edits is not crucial to me, so just displaying the form would suffice.
Only way I've been able to transform such PDFs into PDF files readable to free software implementations of PDF readers is to actually use Acrobat Reader to open the file, print to PostScript file, transform to PDF using ps2pdf and then uninstalling Acrobat Reader of course ;-)
I find it troublesome that Swedish authorities and government agencies are using this file format for applications more and more, leaving no free alternative - that I've found - for the citizens to use, which means that the authorities forces people who want to use the Internet to find and fill in applications to download and install proprietary software from one particular vendor.
Part of the problem might of course be that Adobe made such a decision as to allow PDFs to be editable and did not implement it in a way that was easy to port to other software implementations.
Do you know if this form of PDFs are well documented and standardized and if we can expect free software readers to work with it in the future, or is it a proprietary extension of the PDF format that has no clear and standard published specification?
Thanks anyway for the great work you've done so far with the PDFreaders project!
Kind regards
Rikard Fröberg Sweden
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