On 29.01.2012 06:35, Richard Stallman wrote:
We could approach them again. IIRC it was something about the interactive features of PDF (forms, animations, conditional content), and poppler being designed to display things only, not to interact.It would be good to ask them about this. It sounds like lots of features are not going to be supported.
GNU PDF is designed to handle all these features. The reason we removed GNU PDF from the high priority projects list was that it seemed evince would do the job. If evince is not going to handle all those features, we should put GNU PDF back in the high priority projects list.
AFAIK there have been work-arounds in poppler to get forms working to a certain degree, but I have never seen it work reliably in okular (e.g. I had to print through a Postscript filter to save form data to file) and heard about similar issues in evince. The whole thing seems to be a hack around poppler, which as I mentioned before was never designed to handle this. But maybe we should approach the poppler people directly, as this is all possibly outdated and second hand knowledge.
I don't know if GNU PDF could help us out here, as there was little progress, even in the time, where it was a high priority project. But I maybe the FSF has resources it could allocate to this? [in any case we should check with the poppler people first]