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I'm not sure of New Hampshire's stage agencies, but the most common problem I've experiences interacting with government agencies is PDFs. The format is fairly well-designed to be easy to read so many libre software alternatives can view PDFs, but forms are another story. If a PDF form hasn't been tested in libre readers, it would be unwise to assume that it works in libre readers (or even some proprietary readers). And if testing discovers that it doesn't work, getting it to work isn't necessarily possible with the PDF editing tools available, as making their editors compatible with libre readers isn't exactly a priority for Adobe.


I recently edited a pdf form using Okular (KDE app on Linux - Arch in this case). It was a pretty involved multi page bank mortgage related form. The app that designed this beauty was running on a Mac (can't remember more but I did see Mac in some metadata on it). One field went a bit odd - it would show one number and print another after I got my data entry a bit wrong and corrected it. Clearly a bug.

I passed the form over to Chrome's pdf handler and got the same result. I also passed it through Windows based stuff - I run an IT company. Same result. I did eventually manage to clear the fault.

If I recall correctly it was the day field for date of birth. My DoB is 7th December - I'm a Brit so 7/12. The field wanted 07 for single digit days and I entered 7 followed by the month numbers. So I ended up with 71 in the day field. Field validation was probably not a consideration for an admin in a bank tasked with knocking up a form used by millions of people! If that thing was from IT then they should look for another job.

Anyway - Okular worked the same way as the rest and shared their faults. It did at least manage to look much prettier and work very, very quickly.


Okular uses the poppler PDF library under the hood - and probably do most other non-Adobe implementations. Each software package is not a complete reimplementation of the standard, so it is not unexpected that they share behavior (and bugs).

If you can share the PDF we can file a bug report against poppler.


I'm not sure the fault is with Poppler but with the MacOS thingie that created this beast. However, you are best placed to deal with that.

I'll see if I can find it ...


The problem is new style PDF forms implemented with JS. Old style PDF forms should be handled by open source readers.


Truly had no idea there was JS in PDF forms now. Wild.


It is bizarre considering they intentionally ripped out a lot of Postscript functionality from PDF to make it non-Turing complete.


That hadn't even occurred to me, thank you!




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