I don't have much experience with pdf forms but I found a kind of ducument bakered by Acrobat that doesn't be rendered correctly in okular that uses poppler as backend. I opened a bug issue in bugs.kde.org (https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=212394) but they told that this should be a backend (poppler) where I opened a bug report (https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=24812) problem as the same issue is in every opensource pdf rendering engine that I tryied: ghostscript kpdf from kde3 xpdf gimp There are 2 problems: -------------- 1st problem --------------- ghostscript think that the font used by the document contains ArialMT: gs -sDEVICE=x11 EstrattoConto_1256901690391.pdf GPL Ghostscript 8.62 (2008-02-29) Copyright (C) 2008 Artifex Software, Inc. All rights reserved. This software comes with NO WARRANTY: see the file COPYING for details. Processing pages 1 through 1. Page 1 Can't find (or can't open) font file /usr/share/ghostscript/8.62/Resource/Font/ArialMT. Can't find (or can't open) font file ArialMT. Can't find (or can't open) font file /usr/share/ghostscript/8.62/Resource/Font/ArialMT. Can't find (or can't open) font file ArialMT. Scanning /usr/share/fonts/truetype for fonts... 482 files, 480 scanned, 471 new fonts. Loading ArialMT font from /usr/share/fonts/truetype/arial.ttf... 6354392 2943989 20226572 18829752 3 done. >>showpage, press <return> to continue<< while acrobat reader 8 properties says more characters but not ArialMT (I'll include Acrobat properties screenshot) - immagine1.jpeg The same for okular (see attached immagine2.jpeg) --------------2nd problem (MORE IMPORTANT) --------------------- The document contain a form that is compiled to create the pdf from java Adobe LiveCycle Designer 8. Okular shows that there are forms but doesn't show anithing but the page template.... (see immagine3.jpeg) while acrobat shows correctly the form with prefilled fields. The document is a "statement of account" for credit cards so it's a kind of document that is important to be readable....
Created attachment 5613 [details] The PDF that is not correctly rendered
Created attachment 5614 [details] Font list by Acrobat Reader running in linux
Created attachment 5615 [details] Font list by okular
Created attachment 5616 [details] Erroneus pdf rendered by ghostscript gs -sDISPLAY=x11 EstrattoConto.pdf
Created attachment 5617 [details] What is shown by Acrobat Reader 8 on the same document
1. The sample file uses Arial font and Ghostscript maps it to ArialMT. 2. The file depends on JavaScript and XML form. Ghostscript, currently, doesn't support either one. Old versions of Adobe Acrobat (e.g. 5) render the file like Ghostscript. (To check this one has to convert xref stream to xref table first.)
As far as I know we have no intention of supporting JavaScript or XML
Henry has pointed out that I forgot to say that PDF forms and Javascript are both supported and under ongoing development with our MuPDF product. If you want to work with these kinds of files we would recommend using that over Ghostscript. See www.mupdf.com for more information