How can I fill out PDF forms?
I often need to fill out PDF forms, like government paperwork and stuff for banks. How can I do this on Linux?
Best I could find was Foxit, but it has strange limitations in the Linux version, like not being able to use black text (only navy). Also the software is quite low quality and poorly made.
I would need to at least be able to enter text on top of the form. If the PDF has form fields built in, the program should recognize those. But if they didn't put an actual field element, I should be able to just add my text as an arbitary annotation. Usually I enter text in black, but it is occasionally necessary to use color for emphasis (like blue). I need to draw a signature as well.
I strongly prefer a FOSS option, but if you want to suggest a proprietary one, I don't suppose it would hurt. Please clearly indicate if you're recommending a closed-source or paid app and what the price is.
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LibreOffice Draw (MPL-2.0) does that. It's hardly ideal, because unless you have all the standard Windows fonts (not actually tested!), almost all PDFs will have their text get rendered oddly including when you print. But you can perform the tasks of adding arbitrary text objects, images, etc. I use LibreOffice Draw when adding a scanned image of my wet signature and before scan-pdf.sh-ing it to make it look scanned so I don't have to kill a tree. Draw struggles with existing fillable fields, but that's hardly a problem when you can just add a text object on top of it!
Atril (GPL-2.0) can fill out basic forms but has no keyboard navigation between forms and no additional arbitrary text/images.
Firefox (MPL-2.0) and its javascript tooling offers keyboard-based field navigation for the basic forms. No custom objects that I've found. It seems to handle the non-free font problem better somehow.
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