Why does Ubuntu not ship with a way to fill in PDF forms? I am not asking how to fill the forms. I am asking why there is not a way to do this in the default installation. It's basically the only thing that Ubuntu cannot do that I need my OS to do.
Ubuntu – Why does Ubuntu not ship with a way to fill in PDF forms
default-programspdf
Related Solutions
Evince Document Viewer (Installed by Default)
Here is a screenshot of an editable PDF file being filled in my desktop for you to see Evince Document Viewer in action.
Like this, there should be some other good PDF readers that will allow you to perform this task, but this is working for me and it is really lightweight.
Good luck!
If you do not mind running wine you can try the free PDF-Xchange viewer from here; http://www.tracker-software.com/product/pdf-xchange-viewer
This works great under wine, and you can use it to update metadata and annotate pdf documents as well. I downloaded the form and fill in some fields and was able to save it with this application.
Related Question
- Ubuntu – ny useful software for filling out pdf-forms other than Adobe Reader
- Ubuntu – How to fill out the forms and save the inputs in this tax report pdf file
- Ubuntu – Create fillable or editable fields in a PDF
- Ubuntu – Why do PDFs with forms create black bars on some pages
- Ubuntu – ny software that can fill XFA forms in Ubuntu
Best Answer
Most likely because there's not an open-source implementation of the entire "new" PDF forms specification, called XFA. Older forms (FDF) are generally supported.
While XFA is technically an open standard, like Office Open XML, it is basically a giant glop of a file format that Adobe "documented" to meet government requirements for open file formats. The current version of the specification (3.3) is 1584 pages long (just for the forms feature, not all the rest of PDF) and includes such wondrous features as multiple ways to encode form information, inline denormalized XML attachments inside a PDF-only datastream format, and embedded JavaScript.
To my knowledge (and I've been working with programmatically filling PDF forms this week), Adobe has the only complete implementation of XFA in existence, and I don't know of any open-source graphical client that handles it. (iText and PDFBox have partial support.)