On October 11, 2017 12:19:59 PM EDT, "Stewart C. Russell via talk" <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
Hi Dhaval
However the government of Canada (in its infinite wisdom) has
mandated
that to open and fill their forms, one use Adobe Reader. (As an example see http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/pdf/kits/citizen/CIT0002E-2.pdf ).
Ah, you've just met XFA¹, Adobe's incompatible-with-itself forms standard. These files are produced by Adobe LiveCycle (aka DeathSpiral), a produce Adobe bought in some years ago and can't seem to integrate with its main code base.
You can't even edit these forms in the very expensive Adobe Acrobat Pro. They come pre-encrypted (but with a blank password) so no-one can break DeathSpiral's mess further.
What's very annoying is that the form data is in there somewhere. It's just that there's something (Javascript?) that only shows the first page. The determined can poke around in the files with qpdf and pdftk, but so far, no-one I know has worked their way around it.
Alternatives?
Don't laugh, I use GIMP. Not perfect by any means but if you fill out the same form over and over again, you can figure out the best font and kerning to fit in the boxes and save those as defaults. Sure you have to draw the text entry box yourself and it never seems to line up correctly, at first but thats tweakable It does gets easier the more I do it. Between pdftk and GIMP I get ok results. There may even be some script-fu out there to make it easier, but for now I'm plodding through quickly enough.
This opens and edits them, but it's commercial if you want the full version. This free one *might* watermark/distort your PDFs, but I haven't seen evidence of this:
https://code-industry.net/free-pdf-editor
Link looks dodgy af, I know.
cheers, Stewart
¹: to be fair to Adobe, it *is* possible to create standards-compliant XFA forms, just not in LiveCycle. --- Talk Mailing List talk@gtalug.org https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
-- Russell Sent by K-9 Mail