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On Sun, May 11, 2014 at 8:58 PM, Lew Wolfgang <wolfgang@sweet-haven.com> wrote:
Hi Folks,
I know this has been discussed in the past, but it's finally bitten me directly. While I applaud the decision to not include unsupported proprietary software in openSuSE, the problem remains. I've made several 13.1 installs so far, but I finally got around to installing on my personal machine. Alas, I need to fill out a government provided pdf with form fields and can't do it without acroread.
So, some questions:
1. Is there an open-source pdf package that supports forms? 2. Is there an open-source pdf package that allows digital signatures, especially with keys from SmartCards?
I installed the latest unsupported acroread and appropriate 32-bit libraries and it seems to work. Does anyone have any ideas about how to mitigate the potential security threats? Maybe not access pdf's directly from the Internet or email, and run everything you do process through clamav first?
An alternative would be to use Win-XP Adobe Reader in Virtualbox, but I fail to see how that would be safer! No, I refuse to purchase a Win-7 or 8 license for Virtualbox.
Does anyone have any experience with Adobe Reader in Wine?
There are very few choices.... 1. Install the Acrobat Reader 9 for Linux. 2. Install The latest Acrobat Reader in a Windows VM. 3. Try installing a 3rd party viewer in Wine (like Foxit for example). 4. Try to get the latest Acrobat Reader working in Wine./ 5. Try to use the native Linux readers. 6. If PDF in Linux is really important and the VM option is not possible and the Linux native readers don't cut it for what you need... buy a license to http://www.qoppa.com/pdfstudio/ (there's a demo version so you can test it to see if it can deal with forms) I've tried all 6 options. Acroread 9 has security holes and update issues as you noted... 3rd party viewers rarely work with forms... I've never see Acroread work in Wine... native Linux PDF viewers rarely work with forms... PDF Studio is a hit/miss, and when I tested it, it failed on the PDF form I needed to fill in. In the end my solution is Evince/Okular as the default. Where that fails, Acroread 9. Where that fails, I boot up a Windows VM and use the latest Acroread for WIndows... this last option always works. C. -- openSUSE 13.1 x86_64, KDE 4.13 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org