thevoidzero

TLDR: I recently found out there is "deprecated" XFA format that acrobat still uses in their programs, and government forms have those for dynamic contents in the form that we cannot fill using other softwares. Looking for solutions.

This has been a problem since a long time. Back in 2020 I had dual boot because I needed acrobat to fill PDF forms, but after finding xournal++ program I nuked windows partition. Windows update messing up grub was one of the reason I decided to nuke windows and looking at the posts recently it's still a huge issue.

So the problem I recently encountered is that even the government issued PDF forms need acrobat reader (which is free software for PDF, but only available in windows and mac). Which I didn't think would be an issue and just filled the form in Firefox.

Turns out that was problematic as the PDF forms has fields that are automatically filled, calculated from other fields, only made available when certain checkboxes are checked, etc. and Firefox doesn't support that. Even trying to install the acrobat reader snap (which uses wine) in a VM and opening the PDF on it didn't work. The UI makes me think it's a really old version of the reader.

So without searching for other devices (and filling a PDF with my sensitive information) what solution is there? Installing windows is a hassle even in a VM, and it will use up precious SSD memory. But that's the only solution I can think of.

I also found masterpdf or something like that which the Arch wiki says has support for that, but it didn't work. It says XFA forms are converted to acro forms, and the dynamic part doesn't work. There are websites that promise to work for such forms, but I'm not going to be putting sensitive info on web apps.

Hi everyone,

I'm hoping there are people here who work on FOSS and have applied for grants to support their software financially. I am applying for a grant opportunity that is asking for a software from US gov agency.

My requirements:

• I want to publish it under Open Source Licenses like GPL (not MIT) so other corps can't take this to use on their product,
• The grant agency will get the source code, they can do whatever as long as the license is held,
• I will develop the features they want, and request during the duration of grant,
• I will want to continue development independently after the grant, or apply for more grants from other organizations,
• To clarify the previous point, I do not want to give them the final product so they own it, and I can no longer do anything on the program.

So, if anyone has done similar things, please give me advice on this. Their requirement says "a web repository" should be provided at the end, so I think I can apply with the intention of giving them the software code while keeping the rights. But I don't want to make a mistake in application/contract and lost the rights to the program, I want to develop a lot further than just the features they want for their use case.

Or at least dual license to protect the Open Source Side while giving the grant organization rights to take the code for their other programs because of the money they spent.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/18129059

This feels like it should already be a feature in a terminal. But I didn't find anything that let me do this efficiently.

I had a rust library for converting list like 1-4,8-10 into vectors, but thought I'd expand it into a command line command as well, as it is really useful when I want to run batch commands in parallel using templates.

I wanted to share it since it might be a useful simple command for many people.

Hi all,

mpv communities seem to be tiny in lemmy, so I'm sharing it here.

This is a program I made for music control from local network.

You can run it in a computer with some local media files, or youtube links or any other links yt-dlp supports. And then with the server, you can control the media player and the playlist from any devices in your local network. So that you can just show a QR code or something to house guests for parties, or have it bookmarked within family to control the music.

I wanted to make something similar to how youtube app let's you play in TV and such, but my skills were not enough to do that. So I tried a simple alternative that works with computers. In an ideal world, I could make "Play with local mpv server" option come while on other android apps, but I have zero experience in android app development and it looks complicated.

I know some other programs also give option to control media, but I wanted to give it a go with a simple implementation. Making the web-server was a tricky part. Only tutorial from the rust book was useful here as every other web server developement in rust seems to be async ones using libraries so I would have to make a complicated system to communicate with the mpv. Using the simple Tcp connection let me make a thread with mpv instance in the scope. I do need to support https and file uploads and other things, but I haven't had any luck finding a solution that works with simple Tcp connection like in the tutorial. Let me know if you know anything.

Github: https://github.com/Atreyagaurav/local-mpv

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/11271385

Basically, you can choose some slides from an opened .tex file to copy. It also has the function to see which graphics files are included in the selected files, so you know which ones to copy.

Here is the Github link: https://github.com/Atreyagaurav/beamer-quickie

The PDF pages are shown using the SyncTeX (if available) so that you can visually choose the slides as long as there is a single .tex source file, (might still work without synctex for simple cases).

I've made it on Linux, so it hasn't been tested in windows. You probably will need to compile gtk on Windows if you want to make it work. So if someone is really interested let me know, I can give instructions. Even in linux you'll need to install dependencies.