Hi !
More and more institutions are sending comments to the campaign that they can't recommand any of the readers of pdfreaders.org because they are not able to deal properly with forms. Some alreaydy tested several readers, it turns out that Evince seems to be the closest to work (it's possible to fill the form, but not to do the Input-checking routine (Eingabeprüfroutine).
Does someone here have a response clue, or do we have to concede that here we can't propose any alternative ?
Thanks a lot for your input
Regards
Hi Maelle,
On Mon, 17 Jan 2011 11:18:43 +0100 Maelle Costa wrote:
More and more institutions are sending comments to the campaign that they can't recommand any of the readers of pdfreaders.org because they are not able to deal properly with forms. Some alreaydy tested several readers, it turns out that Evince seems to be the closest to work (it's possible to fill the form, but not to do the Input-checking routine (Eingabeprüfroutine).
This matches my experience. Personally I could use Evince to fill in every PDF form I had. To my knowledge what free PDF reader can't do is to store the content of a form e.g. to send it back filled. But this feature should be available pretty soon. I already saw a video which shows Evince storing a filled PDF which could be read by Adobe and vice versa. To be honest I never tried something like input-checking.
Does someone here have a response clue, or do we have to concede that here we can't propose any alternative ?
I think we have to concede that at this point of time free PDF readers work really well for reading documents and to fill in forms and e.g. print them. If you want to store the content or do some input-checking than this is not possible at this point of time. But the free PDF readers enhance really fast and it is just a matter of time until this features will be available. In such cases I think we should recommend to add both links, the link to Adobe and the link to pdfreaders.org. Not all PDFs and not all users need features like input-checking so a lot of user will be able to use a free PDF reader and the situations where Adobe is really needed will probably reduce in the future.
best wishes, Björn
* Bjoern Schiessle schiessle@fsfe.org [2011-01-17 11:59:47 +0100]:
I think we have to concede that at this point of time free PDF readers work really well for reading documents and to fill in forms and e.g. print them. If you want to store the content or do some input-checking than this is not possible at this point of time. But the free PDF readers enhance really fast and it is just a matter of time until this features will be available. In such cases I think we should recommend to add both links, the link to Adobe and the link to pdfreaders.org. Not all PDFs and not all users need features like input-checking so a lot of user will be able to use a free PDF reader and the situations where Adobe is really needed will probably reduce in the future.
I agree with Björn's points.
Regards, Matthias
Thanks Björn for your helpful points
On 01/17/2011 11:59 AM, Bjoern Schiessle wrote:
To my knowledge what free PDF reader can't do is to store the content of a form e.g. to send it back filled. But this feature should be available pretty soon. I already saw a video which shows Evince storing a filled PDF which could be read by Adobe and vice versa. To be honest I never tried something like input-checking.
I think we have to concede that at this point of time free PDF readers work really well for reading documents and to fill in forms and e.g. print them. If you want to store the content or do some input-checking than this is not possible at this point of time. But the free PDF readers enhance really fast and it is just a matter of time until this features will be available.
I've contacted the developers of the readers recommended at pdfreaders.org to see if there is a possibility for them to work on this feature.
In such cases I think we should recommend to add both links, the link to Adobe and the link to pdfreaders.org. Not all PDFs and not all users need features like input-checking so a lot of user will be able to use a free PDF reader and the situations where Adobe is really needed will probably reduce in the future.
Ok, we'll keep trying this track. Some institutions however noted very clearly that they wouldn't recommend a software that is not as performing for the features they need, as the proprietary one they currently recommend. They just agreed to adjust to formulation so that they no longer present the software as the only possibility to read PDF.
Regards