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

[Rudolf Olah]

I have to say, the best line of your reply is this:

>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.

More relevant to this topic; I've had to work a project for a credit card issuer where we had to fill out 10 pages of PDF forms through a web interface. The user would enter their info into a 3 page web interface and the code would just fill in the form, placing the text in the right areas.

It was tedious as heck to make sure the field values were placed in the right part of the PDF but it was at least possible to do it without forcing the user to use a PDF reader which may or may not include the right Form tools.

-rudolf

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18. May 2016 10:26 by address@hidden:

> 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