Hello Rikard !
On 01/14/2011 04:28 PM, Rikard Fröberg wrote:
I'm curious about what your views are on PDFs with forms?
We are receiving some feedback on the campaign by institutions mostly from Sweden and Germany on this point. Free Software PDF readers are currently efficient to read documents and fill in forms and print them. The features institutions are sometimes asking for are about storing the content of the forms, or doing input-checking. This is not possible for now, but the Free Software PDF readers are by nature very fast enhanced, and these features should appear soon. I have contacted the developers of the readers recommended on http://pdfreaders.org to make them aware of this issue, and I've received the first answers within one hour. Once they knowe the needs of the institutions, they will be able to work on them.
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.
This seems to be a weird feature in the PDF, so that the file recognizes which Reader one uses and only opens if the reader happens to be Adobe Acrobat 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.
[…]
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?
Free Software PDF readers are designed to open the Open Standard PDF [1]. The PDF you indicate most probably entails this added feature, for which the reader are not designed, without necessarily changing the format of the file itself. In short, the PDF is perhaps compliant with the standard but the feature will prevent it from opening with any other software than Adobe Acrobat Reader...
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.
The first step here would be to determine where this error message comes from : is it the editing software of the PDF which automatically adds this feature, or is it intentionally done by the person editing it (less likely ;))
Then, we should contact the institution to make them aware of the problem, and see how they could solve it. Explaining them that their documents are not accessible for everybody should ring a bell and make them react quite quickly...
What we have now is to figure out how we dealt with the particular case you raised. Do you have time to devote to it ? In which case, we could help you formulate your arguments with them, and you could be their contact person, or we could contact them directly, but we would probably need you for the Swedish part ;) Tell me how you'd rather work on it.
Thanks anyway for the great work you've done so far with the PDFreaders project!
Thanks for your support !
Regards
Maëlle Costa
[1] http://pdfreaders.org/os.en.html