On Thu, 15 Jun 2006 19:17:07 -0700 NoOp <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> dijo: > After looking into this a bit further, I find that it is quite a bit > more complicated just as Giuseppe said. > > The problem appears to be that Adobe has a commercial lock on the > Fillable Form PDF process, and in order to accomplish what would seem > simple isn't.
> The good news is that if you use the PDF Export function in OOo Writer, > the file is saved as an editable PDF form which can be printed with the > changes in place. It can also be printed as a PDF via Acrobat and/or > PDFCreator, GhostScript, etc., with the changes left in place. However > that requires your students to muck around with PS printer drivers, > installing GhostScript/PDFCreator, etc., etc. > > Note: you *can* use OOo to export the form document as a PDF, bring it > up in Adobe Reader 7.0, modify it and *then* print it to the opensource > PDFCreator with the changes intact. However I think it too much to ask > your students to have to install yet another application to do this. > > I've not found a easy solution for your seemingly simple question. But > the question & situation bothers me enough that I am calling Adobe > tomorrow to see if there is something that they can suggest. Your > question/idea is a good one and one that should be a snap for educators > etc., to implement without spending a bundle or going through multiple > application hassles. > > <sigh> > > Perhaps for the time being it would be easier just to save & post the > the course tests as both OOo and MS Word formats and have the students > submit the completed forms in the same. Most will have MS Word already > installed, however it certainly would be a good thing to encourage them > to download and install OOo; and for those that do not have MS Word (and > even those who do), provide an OOo install CD at the start of the class > as part of the course materials - they will thank you for it later :-) Many thanks for the effort you've put into this. I sincerely appreciate it. I'm not a programmer and I know little about these things. I'm computer smart when it comes to being able to get my programs to do things, but much less effective if I need to fix something. Actually, I'm not a professor, I'm a graduate student teaching assistant. All the professors here are handing out paper copies of homework assignments to the students, who then fill them out in pencil (with erasures, coffee spills, and assorted other issues), and then turn the papers back in. Besides the time issues (students have to schlep back and forth to school to hand things in), the papers are hard to read. And the professors are hopeless at formatting, proper font use and proofreading their homework handouts. My plan was to 1) help the professors produce better looking, readable and understandable homework assignments, 2) make it easier for the students to produce something legible to hand in, 3) save the students the travel time to hand in their work, which 4) makes it possible for the professor to give an assignment on Thursday, have the students hand it in electronically by Monday, and have the professor hand back the graded homework by next Tuesday's class. As a side benefit, once the homework forms are created the professors can use them over and over indefinitely. And the professor does not have to take class time passing out the homework; it can be just placed on the professor's departmental web site for download. We have the technology, why not use it to save everyone time and effort? As for handing out CDs of OO.o, even that is not necessary. All we need to do is put a link on the professor's departmental web site. This is for linguistics work, so we can also make links for the fonts the students need. And if any of them have trouble getting it to work on their computers, they can come see me. (The majority of students have laptops which they can bring to school for me to fix.) The university computer labs already have OO.o as well as MS Office, so all we need to do is get them to make our special fonts available in the labs. At this point I'm thinking that a pure OO.o solution is the best. I'm basing that on what you said about Adobe controlling our ability to make copies of editable PDFs. All we'd need would be one copy of Acrobat at educational prices to create the PDFs, but the person using it would be me, and I use Linux. If there is an open-source alternative to Acrobat that would allow us to do this without have to use the Adobe Acrobat product, that would be awesome. Lacking that, I think just getting the students to use OO.o might be the best solution. Until that solution can be implemented, at least I can get the professors to install and use OO.o. Then I can take their typing-challenged files and fix them. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
