Re: [libreoffice-users] Re: Filling PDF forms with LibreOffice

Hi :)

Most Office Suites have difficulty handling the pdf format.  

It is a proprietary format rather than an Open one.  The whole point of 
proprietary formats is to force people into buying a product from a particular 
company.  On the rare occasions that such a product is given away for free it is 
to increase market-share and usually has reduced functionality (such as  being 
able to read but not save) or for a limited trial period.

Part of our aim is to offer Open alternatives that are better and easier to 
use.  Partly this is achieved because of the awkwardness of using proprietary 
formats but where there is market dominance people are just forced to buy the 
product however bad it is.

However, there are usually a couple of work-arounds;
1.  Find and use an Open equivalent.  If you send the document to anyone then 
give them a download link to LibreOffice, OpenOffice, KOffice, AbiWord or 
anything else that can read the format so they can quickly install.  It doesn't 
take people long!  Probably even MicroSquish Office 2007 or 2010 can read it.  
If people can't install stuff on the machine they use then a link to GoogleApps 
might help them.

2.  Can't LibreOffice use OpenOffice plugins?  I would be amazed if it can't.  
So, just use whatever plugin you were using before and let us know what it was 
called because it sounds useful!

3. Open the pdf with a pdf reader.  Click anywhere in the document.  Press CtrlA 
(to select everything) then CtrlC to copy and open a new document in Libre to 
paste into (CtrlV).  Fill in and/or edit and "Save As .." an odt or some other 
Open and editable format before Exporting as Pdf again.

Obviously option 1 would be the better long-term answer and would help people 
break free from these proprietary formats.

Regards from
Tom :)







________________________________
From: amine amine <ammine007@gmail.com>
To: users@libreoffice.org
Sent: Wed, 19 January, 2011 9:01:06
Subject: Re: [libreoffice-users] Re: Filling PDF forms with LibreOffice

Salam NoOp,

but as i said in the title "Filling PDF forms with LibreOffice", i'm looking
for a solution with LibreOffice because as you certainly may know it's an
Office suite.

and GIMP is sufficient for doing that, exept that, once the pdf form has
been edited and exported to PDF, if you open it after that it will be an
image contained in a PDF and not text contained in a PDF. so it'll be very
ambarassing to refill all the form once again beacause you've made a mistake
in the name, age or whatever information you're filling your form with.

again,

my PDF forms are created with LibreOffice Writer and exported to PDF format.

when it contains only english characters, reopening it with LibreOffice
Draw, is OK.

when it contains some french characters ç à â ê it's not OK.

when it contains some arabic characters ئ ء ؤ إ لأ لإ  it's not OK.


The problem is with handling some special characters and not all the non
english characters.


I'm using LibreOffice-3.3-RC3 with Oracle PDF Import extension on a
Ubuntu-10.10 32bits machine

Thank you for your time and good luck to you all!

-- 
Amine Arrahmane Achargui

Effectiveness (“Do the right things”)
Efficiency (“Do the things right”)

Great to see that great projects choose to use great projects to become even
greater

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