Edit PDF's

[Frobozz]

My friend sent me a PDF form to fill out. But I only have the free Adobe
Reader program and can see no way to edit it.

Is there a freeware program that I can read the PDF I saved, then fill it
in and send the form back email?

TIA

 

[J. Yazel]

My friend sent me a PDF form to fill out. But I only have the free Adobe
Reader program and can see no way to edit it.

Is there a freeware program that I can read the PDF I saved, then fill it
in and send the form back email?

TIA

===================

If he was your friend, he would send you a text version.

 

[Frobozz]

If he was your friend, he would send you a text version.

yes, quite. And I'll have him send it some other way. However, this has
happened in the past and I finally decided to see if there was an easier
way to handle a PDF form.

 

[Phred]

yes, quite. And I'll have him send it some other way. However, this has
happened in the past and I finally decided to see if there was an easier
way to handle a PDF form.

Well, you could always print it out, fill it out, and mail it back.



Cheers, Phred.

 

[David Simpson]

===================

If he was your friend, he would send you a text version.

Use the text tool to highlight and copy the form, then paste it into
Notepad or Wordpad. Edit it, save it as a text file and send it back
to him.

 

[Anthony Giorgianni]

Another option - the one I use most often - is to convert the form to a jpeg
and fill it out using the text tool in programs such as MS Paint, the Gimp
.... etc.

To do this, I use a print screen program (I mentioned the free Gadwin
printscreen in another thread http://www.gadwin.com/printscreen/) to shoot
the form in sections and then paste it into MS Paint. This usually takes at
least two shots. But you can paste into MS Paint in pieces and stitch
everything together perfectly! Then save the form as jpeg, reopen and file
out. Works great, though it takes a bit of time to figure it out for the
first time.

Oh.... I HATE pdf. Horrible, miserable format. I have no idea why anyone
uses it for anything.

--
Regards,
Anthony Giorgianni

The return address for this post is fictitious. Please reply by posting back
to the newsgroup.

 

[H-Man]

My friend sent me a PDF form to fill out. But I only have the free Adobe
Reader program and can see no way to edit it.

Is there a freeware program that I can read the PDF I saved, then fill it
in and send the form back email?

If it's just a form, made into a PDF, then all you can do is convert it
to a form you can edit, ie, hard copy, or some image format, and take it
from there. If it is an actual PDF form, the reader should allow you to
fill in the actual for fields.
HK

 

[Sascha Wostmann]

Phred :

Well, you could always print it out, fill it out, and mail it back.

or in another sequence: fill it out, print it out, mail it back

just don't mix up the "mail it back" part




Viele Grüße,
Sascha

 

[Al Smith]

Oh.... I HATE pdf. Horrible, miserable format. I have no idea why anyone

uses it for anything.

I agree with you. If it were a wide open format, in which it was
easy to save and edit PDF files, it might be all right, but closed
as it presently is, it's a pain in the ass.

 

[William F. Adams]

Anthony said:

Oh.... I HATE pdf. Horrible, miserable format. I have no idea why anyone
uses it for anything.

One can search in it? Represent text as text and copy / paste?

It's resolution independent?

It's print (and press) ready w/ reasonable file sizes?

It affords the ability to embed fonts and colour profiles so that a document
may be reliably previewed on arbitrary platforms?

FWIW, there's an interesting article in one of the Federal Government oriented
magazines about ``PDF/A'', a specification for archival .pdfs

Al Smith then said:

I agree with you. If it were a wide open format, in which it was
easy to save and edit PDF files, it might be all right, but closed
as it presently is, it's a pain in the ass.

It is ``wide open''. The specification is available for (free) download, and
there are free programs for viewing it (e.g., xpdf).

While there's no freeware for editing .pdfs, there are commercial programs
which handle them quite nicely (much more readily than the closed and
proprietary formats which .pdf has pretty much eclipsed). There's nothing
precluding such freeware though (no need to pay royalties to Adobe), save that
no one has troubled to create such.

Granted, it'd be nice if Adobe could find some more reasonable licensing and
pricing structure for using / filling in / saving and retrieving form data
(seems an obvious candidate for micro payments of some sort), but again,
there's nothing keeping anyone from creating a free program to fill in and save
form data in a .pdf.

William

 

[Anthony Giorgianni]

It's a format that has been adopted by everyone, including the US
government, that really requires the purchase of expensive software to
manipulate properly, especially software that made by...by.... oh Adobe!
Wow, who would have guessed that? I go along with Al. I'd have no problem if
it were like HTML - something anyone can work with easily, with many
available editors, both graphical and text-based, use simple notepad
perhaps, like with html. As far as reading it, it takes forever to load the
darned reader (I see there was some speed up thing on Shell X City
yesterday), and downloading pdf into Explorer is especially miserable. So
far, other readers haven't been too impressive, but I'll keep trying. Thanks
to google for translating many of those pdf web hits. I absolutely hate it.


--
Regards,
Anthony Giorgianni

The return address for this post is fictitious. Please reply by posting back
to the newsgroup.

 

[William F. Adams]

Anthony said:

It's a format that has been adopted by everyone, including the US
government, that really requires the purchase of expensive software to
manipulate properly, especially software that made by...by.... oh Adobe!
Wow, who would have guessed that?

Actually, it's possible to create a .pdf form using only free software which'll
make use of the (free) Adobe Acrobat Reader to post the form data to a server
(again, running free software).

I go along with Al. I'd have no problem if
it were like HTML - something anyone can work with easily, with many
available editors, both graphical and text-based, use simple notepad
perhaps, like with html.

Uh, one can do that, if one just troubles to download, read, and understand the
specification.

As far as reading it, it takes forever to load the
darned reader (I see there was some speed up thing on Shell X City
yesterday),

Granted, Adobe Reader 6 is slow to load, as is Adobe Acrobat Reader 5 in Mac OS
9 --- all other cases are pretty quick on modern hardware.

and downloading pdf into Explorer is especially miserable.

It's actually not bad to make use of a .pdf in Mac OS X --- even in-line as
graphics in Safari works quite nicely.

So
far, other readers haven't been too impressive, but I'll keep trying. >Thanks
to google for translating many of those pdf web hits. I absolutely hate it.

Here's an experiment.

Take a look at the Google html translation of one of the pieces in my
portfolio:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=i+am+your+flag+pdf

Now look at the source .pdf:

http://members.aol.com/willadams/portfolio/typography/i_am_your_flag.pdf

I'd be glad of suggestions for alternative file formats for this.

William

 

[Phred]

If it's just a form, made into a PDF, then all you can do is convert it
to a form you can edit, ie, hard copy, or some image format, and take it
from there. If it is an actual PDF form, the reader should allow you to
fill in the actual for fields.

Yeah. I've seen PDF forms that do allow that. Though you
probably need the specific version of Reader to match the version of
Acrobat.


Cheers, Phred.

 

[Frobozz]

...If it is an actual PDF form, the reader should allow you to
fill in the actual for fields.

I am going to assume then that it is not an actual PDF form since all I
get is the "hand" for moving the page around for viewing ----

thanks a lot, I learned something there. Guess they just scanned a for
into some pdf format.

 

[John Culleton]

Anthony said:


It is ``wide open''. The specification is available for (free) download, and
there are free programs for viewing it (e.g., xpdf).

Unfortunately Xpdf won't run under Windows. And Acrobat Reader is
inferior to Xpdf in this respect: If the underlying pdf file changes,
then Acrobat Reader errors off when the page is changed. Xpdf however
will merely use the updated file when the page is changed. I use this
feature of Xpdf to give me a semi WYSIWYG approach to TeX development.
But I can't port the technique for Windoze users because A/R isn't as
hardy as Xpdf.

So is there a freeware alternative to Xpdf that will run under MS
Windows? I have automated everything else via F keys in Gvim, but
Acrobat Reader is a deal breaker.

John Culleton

 

[William F. Adams]

John Culleton asked:

So is there a freeware alternative to Xpdf that will run under MS
Windows? I have automated everything else via F keys in Gvim, but
Acrobat Reader is a deal breaker.

I believe your best hope is for a working version of the mgstep libraries for
GNUstep whch allow GNUstep programs to run in Windows.

I believe that one can script Acrobat though so that an external process could
watch the source, close the .pdf which Acrobat has open, then tell it to open
the new version --- I seem to recall there being something along those lines
for Linux at least posted to CTAN.... might be adapted to Windows (or maybe it
was for Windows)

Of course, if you could dig up a copy of OPENSTEP Enterprise for Windows NT you
could use its Display PostScript and probably port TeXView.app pretty easily
and get an environment like to TeXshop.app for Mac OS X...

William