[gs-devel] PDF Formularies in Ghostscript

[Alberto Cuesta]

Dear Ray,

thanks a lot for your reply, I can say that it is truly helpful. I'll 
contact both your sales department and my manager to see if we should 
negotiate something to code a prototype over Ghostscript. I hope we will 
collaborate.

Cheers,
Alberto

Ray Johnston escribió:
> Dear Alberto,
>
> Ghostscript previously did not view any AcroForm data, but this is 
> partly implemented,
> disabled unless -dShowAcroForm=true is specified. Ghostscript 
> currently does not
> do anything with the 'interactive' elements of PDF such as JavaScript 
> viewing mods,
> but an application can send PostScript strings to access elements from 
> the PDF
> such as fetching the JavaScript in order to process within your 
> application.
>
> For an example of PostScript that can dig information out of a PDF using
> Ghostscript, please see toolbin/pdf_info.ps. You may also want to look at
> the way Ghostscript gets the AcroForm dictionary in lib/pdf_main.ps and
> how the data is processed in lib/pdf_draw.ps.
>
> Note that since the AcroForm code is quite new, you will want to get the
> latest source from svn (using: svn co 
> http://svn.ghostscript.com/trunk/gs )
> or wait for 8.57 (which is coming out very soon).
>
> If you do decide to enhance Ghostscript to utilize the JavaScript code or
> otherwise process and/or fill in the form data, we would be interested
> in this for possible inclusion in the product since yours is not the 
> first
> time this has been requested.
>
> If Ghostscript continues to interest you and you encounter problems or
> questions, please feel free to contact us. We cannot guarantee how
> much help we can provide for other than commercial customers, but
> since the project is interesting we will try to assist.
>
> Best Regards,
> Ray Johnston
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> alcueca wrote:
>> Hello all, excuses if this information can be found on the 
>> documentation, the
>> issue at hand is a bit complex and after some research is now when I 
>> think I
>> could use some expert advice.
>>
>> I have a client which desires to code an open-source PDF viewer which 
>> would
>> be able to display forms, allow the user to fill them, and run 
>> JavaScript
>> validation tests on the introduced information.
>>
>> My company is first researching the feasibility and costs of such a 
>> project,
>> and later we would be responsible for the development of the first
>> prototype, the client would finish the development and carry the
>> manteinance. We are looking for open-source pdf libraries and viewers 
>> which
>> we could use or extend for this task.
>>
>> As far as I know, there are only three open-source libraries, which 
>> are the
>> base for every open-source PDF viewer out there: Ghostscript, xpdf -
>> poppler, and mupdf. I haven't seen any open-source pdf viewer which 
>> supports
>> forms.
>>
>> The questions are:
>>
>> Are formularies supported by the ghostscript library?
>> are they expected to be supported in near future?
>> maybe any other of the libraries could be used for this end?
>> Is there any open-source pdf viewer which supports forms?
>>
>> Thanks a lot for your attention, cheers,
>> Alberto
>>
>>
>> P.S: Excuse me for reposts, I received notifications from nabbler 
>> about the
>> needing to subscribe and I'm not sure if the previous mail arrived.
>>   
>
>