Re: [lp-ca-on] Ontario government forms

[Daniel Villarreal]

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On 05/18/2016 10:26 AM, Stewart C. Russell wrote:
> Hi Daniel,

Hi Stewart, thank you for the information.


>> ... question about forms at the Government of Ontario ... 
>> http://www.forms.ssb.gov.on.ca/
> 
> Looking at a few of these, I see that they are produced by a huge 
> range of different software. Different versions of Adobe Distiller 
> and LiveCycle should be considered entirely different pieces of 
> software.
> 
> At best, PDF is just marks on paper. Any meaning you can intuit 
> from the document is merely a side-effect.
> 
> Adobe has two different form technologies out there:
> 
> * AcroForm - a basic key/value structure. Included in ISO 
> standard.
> 
> * XFA - an extended form structure with better Unicode handling.
> 
> On top of both of these, there's the possibility of JavaScript 
> managing some background logic. And then there's encryption, which 
> may or may not allow you to fill forms on Linux.
> 
> 
So, which form did you try?

I tried one of the following...

search for "statement of conscience" at http://www.forms.ssb.gov.on.ca

Form Title      Form Number     Ministry
Statement of Conscience or Religious Belief  New        010-3042E
  Education

Statement of Conscience or Religious Belief Immunization of School
Pupils Act   014-4897-64E    Health and Long-Term Care

Statement of Medical Exemption  New     010-3041E       Education

- ----------------------------------------------------
01
Statement of Conscience or Religious Belief  010-3042E

http://www.forms.ssb.gov.on.ca/mbs/ssb/forms/ssbforms.nsf/FormDetail?Ope
nForm&ACT=RDR&TAB=PROFILE&SRCH=1&ENV=WWE&TIT=statement+of+conscience&NO=
010-3042E

You must download Adobe Acrobat Reader (version 9.0 or above) to
view/print PDF forms.

- ----------------------------------------------------
02
Statement of Conscience or Religious Belief Immunization of School
Pupils Act   014-4897-64E    Health and Long-Term Care

http://www.forms.ssb.gov.on.ca/mbs/ssb/forms/ssbforms.nsf/FormDetail?Ope
nForm&ACT=RDR&TAB=PROFILE&SRCH=1&ENV=WWE&TIT=statement+of+conscience&NO=
014-4897-64E

- ----------------------------------------------------
03
Statement of Medical Exemption  New     010-3041E       Education

http://www.forms.ssb.gov.on.ca/mbs/ssb/forms/ssbforms.nsf/FormDetail?Ope
nForm&ACT=RDR&TAB=PROFILE&SRCH=1&ENV=WWE&TIT=statement+of+conscience&NO=
010-3041E


> I looked at two:
> 
> * SR-LV-129E.pdf - Application for Accessible Parking Permit 
> (LiveCycle 11, XFA, Encrypted)
> 
> * 0022E.pdf - Application for Ontario’s Home Energy Audit Grant 
> (Distiller 9, AcroForm, Encrypted)
> 
> With Evince 3.18.2 I was able to edit both forms, save and reload 
> changes, and print the form with form content. The only glitch was
>  printing checkboxes, which came out as very faint dots. I suspect 
> it's a font thing; PDF adds a level of font embedding hell that 
> makes Windows DLL hell look tame.

 Wow, well, there's a lot of fonts available in the GNU/Linux
repositories, and I've looked at quite a few and installed quite a
few... but aside from installing stuff for ancient Egyptian
hieroglyphs, I don't mess with this too much.


>> Is there a way for someone to do this using the stock Fedora 
>> repositories?
> 
> I don't use Fedora, but my results are from a pretty stock Ubuntu 
> 16.04.

I will try more programs and distributions.


>> If someone has already researched this, does this mean that
>> there are alternatives available
> 
> They provide plain text versions of many of the forms, which is 
> accessible, but not very polite... cheers, Stewart

Well, good to know that there's plain text. I wouldn't state that
plain text is impolite :)

Perhaps plain text gives people the opportunity to use free/libre
software to do the same thing or something akin to the same thing?


- -- 
Daniel Villarreal
http://www.youcanlinux.org
address@hidden
PGP key 2F6E 0DC3 85E2 5EC0 DA03  3F5B F251 8938 A83E 7B49
https://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0xF2518938A83E7B49

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