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A comment on PDF Is the World's Most Important File Format. Parent comment

Re:PDF Is the World's Most Important File Format by kxyvr on Friday May 03, 2019 @02:05PM (#19820748)
I used to have good luck using pdftk for filling out forms and the IRS seemed to encode them well, but it looks like pdftk is mostly dead. Nowadays, evince seems to work OK, sometimes, for filling out forms. And, yes, Acrobat seems to be the only piece of software that does all of them.

That said, my personal favorite for a complete screw you to the format comes from Texas and form 2382:

https://hhs.texas.gov/laws-regulations/forms/2000-2999/form-...

If you decompress it, you'll find that they encoded an HTML webpage into the PDF and, as far as I can tell, this can only be viewed on Windows with Acrobat. It's almost like Texas doesn't want people to apply for medicaid funds.

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Re:PDF Is the World's Most Important File Format by phonon on Friday May 03, 2019 @02:27PM (#19820962)
They used Livecycle (XFA) forms. It's not part of the latest PDF standard.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XFA

Here is a plain Acroform version :-)

https://send.firefox.com/download/3d2da3ccd62d4ce9/#CJRCa5XO...

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Re:PDF Is the World's Most Important File Format by kxyvr on Friday May 03, 2019 @02:44PM (#19821115)
Ha! Finally an answer to what these forms are. Thanks! Speaking of which, what software did you use to make the conversion? It might be nice to pass this information along to the agency to see if they'd be willing to convert all their forms.
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Re:PDF Is the World's Most Important File Format by phonon on Friday May 03, 2019 @03:08PM (#19821319)
Save file as Static PDF Form from Livecycle/AEM. (That means advanced capabilities like tables that can "grow" are removed.) Open in Acrobat Pro. Extract the pages (Shift-rightclick the thumbnails on the left side) to a new PDF.

If you asked Adobe, they would say this is not possible. :-)

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Re:PDF Is the World's Most Important File Format by justbaker on Friday May 03, 2019 @03:07PM (#19821308)
>It might be nice to pass this information along to the agency to see if they'd be willing to convert all their forms.

If you see a way to, make them pay for it; there is money to be made.

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Re:PDF Is the World's Most Important File Format by swiley on Friday May 03, 2019 @11:04PM (#19824121)
I filled out my taxes with evince a couple years ago, it felt pretty neat using only open source software to do it (and seeing the whole form at once was way less stressful for me compared to how turbo tax does it, I know some people are the opposite though.)
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