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Comment by maskros | Hacker News Reader

There's already plenty of open source implementations of PDF parsing: Ghostscript, MuPDF, XPDF, Poppler, Pdfium, just to name the first few that come to mind.

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All do not support typewriter or forms. This makes easier to fill up forms

MuPDF supposedly supports forms in the latest version.

I’ve never seen it work though.

Alright, so I noticed this before and just tried it again. While I can fill in forms, does anyone know how to save them? The man page says "S", but that doesn't work and I remember this causing issues for me in the past.

If you press "a" to open the annotation side panel, there will be a button to save the PDF file if the document has been modified.

OMG, MuPDF has annotations now!?

Evince can handle forms most of the time. That said, Acrobat allows things like Livecycle (XFA) forms, which are nonstandard and will break just about everything outside of Acrobat. Outside of that, pdftk can handle forms using the forms data format (FDF):

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

Though, it was mostly an exercise in frustration. That said, IRS forms used to work great with this.

However, long story short, Evince works most of the time.

I'm not sure whether it's just Poppler or the software that uses it (Okular by KDE), but I know that typewriter is supported (I just filled a few bureaucratic work-related form). Forms as well.

And most of them are either (A)GPL or so prohibitively expensive for the commercial version that you can't really use them in small commercial projects at all.

Sounds good to me.

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