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Fillable/printable .pdf software for Pi?

Apparently the US tax people are expecting people to do this.

The commonest one, xpdf, is explicitly a viewer only and qpdfview only allows rotation and scaling. According to Wikipedia the only programs that explicitly allow you to edit an existing PDF file and run under Linux are: LibreOffice Draw, OpenOffice Draw, PDFedit, Pdftk, PDF Studio and Karbon

Of this lot, I've only heard of the first two until now and others have said that Pdftk is just a set of command line tools, nor with a GUI front end and are a faff to use.

So what do you use to edit PDF files?

Bob Prohaska: were you just trying to use LibreOffice Writer or did you try LibreOffice Draw too?

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Martin    | martin at 
Gregorie  | gregorie dot org
Reply to
Martin Gregorie
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Editing a PDF file is not the same thing as filling in a fillable PDF form. If you want to change the form (change the layout or alter the text outside the fillable fields) than you need a PDF editor, but you can fill in a fillable form with a PDF viewer (provided it has that capability).

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Cheers, 
 Daniel.
Reply to
Daniel James

On Wed, 11 Mar 2020 16:20:13 -0000 (UTC), Martin Gregorie declaimed the following:

Given that one started as a fork of the other...

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	Wulfraed                 Dennis Lee Bieber         AF6VN 
	wlfraed@ix.netcom.com    http://wlfraed.microdiversity.freeddns.org/
Reply to
Dennis Lee Bieber

The OP refers only to filling out forms, not editing them..."editing" would imply a bit more than merely filling out a form. If you're looking for something that will let you fill out a PDF form, Okular works well for that purpose. I've done my taxes with it (and a calculator) the past several years.

_/_ / v \ Scott Alfter (remove the obvious to send mail) (IIGS(

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Top-posting! \_^_/ >What's the most annoying thing on Usenet?

Reply to
Scott Alfter

Just tried it now. LibreOffice Draw opens the form with some minor layout errors (fonts overlapping) but can't display field entries already present and does not seem to recognize fillable fields. It does seem to recognize graphic features like lines in tables. It does not seem to detect or offer to alter text embedded in the form.

Thanks for replying!

bob prohaska

Reply to
bob prohaska

I'd report a bug if I didn't have to create an account with credentials.

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is the test case. It won't be an issue until next year, and by then Adobe will probably have screwed things up in a new way.

Perhaps somebody with an account can toss another twig on the pyre.

It appears Chromium on the Pi can fill out the form quite successfully.

The idea is unappealing given Google's obsession with data mining.

Thanks to all for reading and replying!

bob prohaska

Reply to
bob prohaska

Thanks for the update. Filed for future reference.

In case you need them, the PDF specification is here:

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and a GNU commentary which picks a simple example apart is here:

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Introduction_to_PDF

The example doc is here:

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db/Hello.pdf

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Martin    | martin at 
Gregorie  | gregorie dot org
Reply to
Martin Gregorie

Following up: I found an example PDF Form on the web, so checked out qpdfview and xpdf.

As I thought, Xpdf does not seem to have any form-filling capability.

However, qpdfview can accept input data provided that the PDF Form is first saved and its permissions changed to read+write. Don't forget to save it after entering your data (duh!)

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Martin    | martin at 
Gregorie  | gregorie dot org
Reply to
Martin Gregorie

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