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Comment by timw4mail | Hacker News Reader

PDFs for reading is one thing. Fillable PDFs are evil incarnate. Apparently there are multiple ways to do it, and only Acrobat Reader is capable of making them all work.

Then you have abominations like embedded flash...

As a standalone file representing the format of a book, PDFs are a good format. But then PDFs can unfortunately (sometimes) store much more, and then can be a security minefield.

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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.

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...

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.

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. :-)

>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.

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.)

Is there a reasonable, standard, lightweight way of making fillable PDFs? In theory it does seem like a reasonable extension of PDF (people send me xls spreadsheets that have been abused as forms, and I want to stab them) -- is there any non-toxic way of doing this? Perhaps with LaTeX?

I'm not going to call it good, but I used to use FDF (forms data format) along with pdftk to fill in PDF files on the command line using a combination of Makefiles, pdfs, and fdfs. Here's the best reference I could find for the "standard":

https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#iso:std:iso:19444:-1:ed-1:v1:en

That said, the workflow was pretty terrible. Basically, I had to use pdftk to output from the pdf what fields were writable. Some forms like from the IRS, were pretty good at labeling things. Most other forms were terrible and there was a lot of guessing and checking. As such, this doesn't exactly answer your question, but more to comment that there was sort of a way, kind of.

OSX file preview lets you fill in PDF forms with no problems, and no additional software to install.

Well, OS X Preview saves your changes even if you quit, and it has some serious issues with radio buttons in documents. It really caused quite the problem with people filling in repetitive forms. The standard "open document, add changes, print, quit" workflow that works in Office products goes very badly on OS X.

You can turn off that auto-saving feature in system preferences. It’s called something like “Ask before saving changes.”

Depends on what it's actually doing. Preview can do actual forms, but it can also "fill" in forms by trying to detect lines and boxes.

PDFs can even contain JavaScript...

Indeed they can: https://github.com/osnr/horrifying-pdf-experiments

(Note, breakout game only works in Chrome's PDF reader)

PDF is the EMACS of file formats.

PDF can contain almost everythign

Even as a Book format it is klunky, as it has no indexing. Take the text to speech tools and the bigger the book the slower it gets near the end of the book.

I would rather have a plain ole html file with formatting flags than a PDF book.

It does have indexing, which I frequently use.

If your pdf book does not have it, there's some readers who can add it. e.g. https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/creating-pdf-indexes.h...

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