Randy: > But my experience is that PDF forms actually DO require certain Adobe > programs to correctly manipulate the fields. I can't remember if it > was the standard "Acrobat" or a some kind of enhanced Acrobat. I base > this on my son's Boy Scout Eagle form 2 years ago: some non-Adobe > programs would open it and allow typing, but the entered text would not > reliably "save". I was sure my son was doing something wrong until I > did it a few times myself. (such fun typing in 8 pages of content a > couple of times, only to have it completely lost both times !). I > tried a couple of other PDF programs as well, with bad results. > My advice: don't ever use PDF forms!
> I never got to the bottom of the problem, but I suspect there are > proprietary quirks that are not part of the PDF standard. It could be as simple as not having permission to write the output. Whenever I encounter such a program based editor, I first test it with a bit of text to make sure that I can save the output, close the program and reopen. Also, I do 99% of my editing in vim (programmers might like emacs better but vim lets one work very quickly.) So I first capture the sections and headers and type the text using vim, saving into plain text files. Then I cut/paste into the dangerous PDF or DOC form. The result is that I will have the text in a simple text file that will last forever (after the companies no longer suppy the binary!) and if the program that runs the form fails my text is safe. Tom Thomas D. Schneider, Ph.D. Senior Investigator National Institutes of Health National Cancer Institute Center for Cancer Research Gene Regulation and Chromosome Biology Laboratory Molecular Information Theory Group Frederick, Maryland 21702-1201 [email protected] http://schneider.ncifcrf.gov/(current link) http://alum.mit.edu/www/toms (permanent link) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This SF.net email is sponsored by Windows: Build for Windows Store. http://p.sf.net/sfu/windows-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Skim-app-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/skim-app-users
