[Scribus] PDF in Windows

[John Jason Jordan]

On Sat, 13 Jan 2007 22:52:17 +0100
Tom Hicks <tom at hicks.f2s.com> dijo:

> In message <87dbb1c40701112056k2e8b7ad9q6225d8f3c12e5f27 at mail.gmail.co 

> The reason that you can save the formfill infomation on the irs pdf is 
> because they have got a  licence form adobe to produce pdf's where the 
> users can save the form infomtion. Basicaly, the ability to allow 
> people to save their form data is not documented in the pdf spec, so 
> only adobe can produce pdf's able to form fill
> (as far as I have heard, at any rate)

You can create editable PDFs with Scribus and with OpenOffice.org. To
edit them the user needs Adobe Reader 7.0 or later. You can't edit the
PDF with any other PDF viewer. And the only editing the user can do is
to fill in the data on the form. In Scribus that means the PDF field
data. (In OpenOffice.org they're called form controls.) 

The user can print the PDF file after filling in the fields. However,
you are correct that the user cannot save the PDF as a new PDF file.
However, if the user has alternative PDF creation tools it is possible
to create a new PDF from the edited PDF by "printing" to the PDF
creation tool. The user can also save the edited PDF as a new PDF file
if it was created with Adobe Acrobat 7.0 or 8.0 and the creator set the
permissions to allow saving as a new PDF file. (That's how the IRS does
it.) Adobe Acrobat 7.0 or 8.0 are the only tools that allow the creator
to set permission to save as a new file.

As far as I know at this time there are only three ways to create
editable PDFs:

1) Microsoft Word or OpenOffice.org Writer, printing to Adobe Acrobat
    Professional 7.0 or 8.0
2) OpenOffice.org Writer's native direct PDF export
3) Scribus using PDF fields and exporting directly to PDF

If you're on Linux forget (1). You can't run any version of Adobe
Acrobat on Linux, even with Wine or CrossOver Office. The only way to
do it is to use Vmware or Qemu, and that means you need a Windows
license because you're basically just installing Windows as a guest OS.
So Linux users can do it only with OpenOffice.org Writer or Scribus.