PDF Displaying

[Sean Middleditch <sean middleditch iname com>]

OK, I've got a bit of a difficult problem here (from my viewpoint,
anyways - I'm quite inexperienced at GUI development).

A family member just recently quit a job at a firm that developed
high-end tax software.  The software imported a PDF document, but the
program allowed entry into certain fields (which were added to the PDF
document), and calculations and all that sort of stuff.

However, the software is rather laughable.  The tools they use for
updating certain info is DOS-based (which caused the employees win9x and
NT boxes to crash a lot), all of the update formulas are hard-coded into
the software, they used extremely cheap hacks to import one bit of data
from one form into the next, etc.  It's really horrible.  So I decided
to write a Linux tax-form program (since there are none that I know of).

I need a way to display PDF forms, and add to that text-entry fields at
any given X,Y location on the form, with the text entry being of
variable length (although not height, that should be one line tall).
The program is pretty much a piece of cake, except that I don't know how
I should go about displaying the information like I said.  I have a
rough-rough text-based version I wrote in Python (says Form XXX: Line
N:  and asks for input, calculates everything, prints results), but I
want a nive GUI-based printable program.

I was wondering if SDL might be better for this (It would be far simpler
to display PDF files converted to images, and draw text-entry fields
with the SDL GUI on top of that), but I'd prefer GNOME, even if it isn't
as cross-platform as SDL is, yet.

Anyways, anyone have any idea how I might do the PDF display/text-field
overlay thing in GTK+/GNOME, or should I try SDL instead?

Thanks,
Sean Etc.