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

[Rod Dixon, J.D., LL.M.]

The PDF format is now an open standard, and other vendors operate in the PDF
space.

Once it is widely known among enough vendors that government agencies want
to use puffs to create editable forms, I am sure others will enter the
space, if they have not already done so. I doubt that there is a significant
or long-term problem here.

-Rod
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ihab A.B. Awad" <ihab at ahc.umn.edu>
To: "Mahesh T. Pai" <paivakil at yahoo.co.in>; <license-discuss at opensource.org>
Sent: Monday, April 26, 2004 12:59 PM
Subject: Re: [OT?] US & CA govt use of PDF fill-in forms


: 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
:
: --
: license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3
:

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