When I try to open the Polish tax forms generated by our governmental "e-deklaracje" application, I get the following message instead of the content of the form: ========================================= Please wait... If this message is not eventually replaced by the proper contents of the document, your PDF viewer may not be able to display this type of document. You can upgrade to the latest version of Adobe Reader for Windows®, Mac, or Linux® by visiting http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html. For more assistance with Adobe Reader visit http://www.adobe.com/support/products/ acrreader.html. Windows is either a registered trademark or a trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. Mac is a trademark of Apple Inc., registered in the United States and other countries. Linux is the registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in the U.S. and other countries. ==========================================
This is becoming a more common problem as several official organisations (British and Polish tax agencies have been mentioned), banks and others are now distributing PDFs that trigger this message. By knowingly displaying this message, Debian is effectively undermining our own mission, which is to advance software freedom I would propose that Debian should patch all PDF readers to remove the link to the non-free acrobat download and replace it with a link to a page about this issue, mentioning the dangers of non-free software and providing various options to help facilitate complaints to the organisations that are using non-standard PDFs.
A link: https://www.formulaires.modernisation.gouv.fr/gf/showFormulaireSignaletiqueConsulter.do?numCerfa=13752 Where they even say: " /Le logiciel Adobe Reader version 8.0 ou + est nécessaire pour visualiser et utiliser ce formulaire. Cliquez *http://get.adobe.com/fr/reader/* pour le télécharger gratuitement." /"modernisation.gouv.fr" my ass.
Turns out the so called "pdf" isn't a pdf at all: "I started looking at what it would take to implement javascript. The problem is all the javascript in this pdf does is check the viewer version and if > 7.0 loads the "XFA" plugin. The pdf contains a stream with 600KB of XML starting with "<template xmlns="http://www.xfa.org/schema/xfa-template/2.1/">". There is a 1500 page specification for XFA at http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/en/xml/xfa_spec_3_3.pdf Needless to say, at this point I gave up."