Last week, I wasted about 20 minutes trying to fill out a form.

The problem is simple. The form contains a box where I'm supposed to 
write a file path. But the pathname goes through 5 subdirectories, 
ending in a 33-character filename. I don't know about you, but I can't 
write that much text in a space less than 10cm across.

Of course, a computer can easily print that much text in such a space, 
in a legible typeface. What it /can't/ easily do is print that text over 
the top of the printed form.

The next result is that I had to undertake the ridiculous operation of 
printing the form, printing the text to go on the form, and then cutting 
the text out - with a pair of scissors - and gluing it to the form, and 
photocopying it onto another sheet of paper (to be sure the glued 
portion doesn't fall off or something).

All of this seems very silly to me. The printer is perfectly capable of 
printing the final result. It's just that the computer software does not 
allow me to.

(About the best that I could do would be to load the PDF file containing 
the form, load it into Ghostscript, convert it into a bitmap, print the 
text I want to a Postscript printer and redirect to file [thereby 
creating a PS file], load that into Ghostscript, convert it to a bitmap, 
and then use a bitmap editor to combine the two [huge] bitmaps together, 
before finally sending that to the printer. That's a *hell* of a lot of 
work for something this trivial.)

I seriously wonder why nobody has come up with software to composite two 

overprint two PDFs. (Actually, it seems to be impossible to edit the PDF 
files in any way, except the move whole pages around or edit metadata. 


It seems daft to me that, in the modern age, this is still such a problem.

(On the other hand, I suppose if I could convince the people in charge 
to make the PDF form into a *PDF form*, then I could fill it out 
electronically...)

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