[OT?] US & CA govt use of PDF fill-in forms

[Ihab A.B. Awad]

On Monday 26 April 2004 02:53, Mahesh T. Pai wrote:
> Ihab A.B. Awad said on Sun, Apr 25, 2004 at 07:37:06PM -0700,:
>  > Should  the government  be thereby  institutionalizing  this format
>  > (Adobe Acrobat PDF)  to the benefit of the  one corporation (Adobe)
>  > that provides  tools to properly  edit it? ...
>
> FSF India says the government should not use  the portable document
> format. See http://www.gnu.org.in/philosophy/mitrules.html

Thank you for the link ... I didn't know about that!

<rant>

Actually, with all due respect to FSF India's opinion -- which is pretty much 
what I would expect from FSF anywhere -- I claim the US tax agencies' policy 
fails an even weaker standard: that of the availability of more than one 
source for the software required to use the format.

The killer here is that you *can* use the PDF form -- but you just can't save 
an *editable* copy without paying $$$ to Adobe. So extra taxpayer money was 
spent creating PDF forms (as opposed to simply providing PDF to be printed 
and filled out in hardcopy). Then, to use this taxpayer-sponsored work, you 
end up shoehorned into the marketing campaign of the one and only source of 
software for it.

</rant>

Peace,

Ihab

-- 
Ihab A.B. Awad
Snr Scientific Programmer, Dept of Genetics
Stanford University

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