ouch: the beginning of the end

[Paul Dupuis]

So the XPDF viewer lets you grab the text from PDFs, the formattedRect
of any selected Text, and the page (or ant portion of the rendered page)
as an Image in addition to just viewing a PDF

I assume the issue that you view EPS as high resolution for the purposes
of printing the PDF form back out with your layered fields filled in.

You can grad what ever resolution of a PDF page you want with XPDF. You
set the scaling to say 400% and then get the page image and scale the
image to 25% and you have a image at normal size but at 4x screen
resolution. Want more resolution, set the PDF scale to 800% and fetch
the page image. Have a super high resolution printer - keep scaling!

It seems to me XPDF is capable of doing everything you need to do.

If the forms have labels for the fields, such as:

Name: [space on the pdf to type or write a name]

You can just enter a list of the text of the labels, search the PDF text
for the keywords/phases, get the formatedRect, and autocreate a
transparent field for the data offset to the right of the <right>
coordinate of the formatted rect.