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

[Stewart C. Russell]

Hi Daniel,

> I have a question about forms at the Government of Ontario Central
> Forms Repository
> 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 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.

> 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.

> 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. But then, bureaucracy is a stand-in for
structural violence, so I'd expect nothing less.

cheers,
 Stewart