Thanks very much for the replies, Bill & Bruno (I'm not above doubling-down on the ice-cream offer!).
Bruno, your suggestion of removing the XFA before filling the form (with the questions.forms.RemoveXfa code) is a good one: unfortunately, our workflow requires that the form is user-enabled before it's populated by iText. I just ran RemoveXfa to confirmed the expected behavior: removing the XFA breaks pre-existing user-enabling (because the PDFStamper constructor does not append); but removing the XFA with append=true in the PDFStamper constructor prevents any value from being set. FYI, user-enabling the form before pre-filling is required because our workflow goes something like this: 1. User requests download of user-enabled pdf form 2. Servlet pre-populates form with some of the values (header-type info) 3. Servlet downloads pre-populated, user-enabled form to user 4. User edits and saves, edits and saves offline (<500 users) 5. User uploads form to processing servlet So since this is an on-demand servlet download, we can't stop between steps 2 and 3 to add user rights to the form. As to the other options: - I looked at LiveCycle ES, but it's not implementable for us at this late date; - A different PDF client that can read and save forms locally is something I hadn't thought of. From this suggestion, I just saw a list of these options at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_PDF_software . Realistically though, Adobe Reader is the universal cross-OS pdf client on our intranet devices, so at this date, I'm more inclined to pursue some flavor of the following: - Generate a non-XFA, pure AcroForm instead. To skip to the end of the story, a couple of the old XFA->Acro conversion hacks no longer work in Acrobat 8, but I did achieve partial success last night: if you do a File->Print of the XFA Form and send it to AdobePDF (which is available as a "Printer" when you install AcrobatPro), it will create a flattened PDF file that looks exactly like the old XFA form (come to think of it, I could have just used iText to flatten it, eh?). From there, I used the tools at "Tools->Forms" to manually add an input text Field, and presto: pure AcroForm that works with multiple offline saves. Now all I have to do is sit with my designer co-worker and re-create all of the form fields in this way (I really must be missing something in the tool though, because I'm finding this manner of Acrobat form creation to be quite crude – did people really used to design forms this way?). So I'm also going to try and quickly evaluate the JPedal/Scribus/RenderX/Open Office tools you mentioned to make this conversion easier. I also read a claim last night that Acrobat9 can do XFA->Acro conversion, but this is yet to be confirmed (Bill, it sounded like you create AcroForms directly - any suggestions?). Thanks you again for your assistance. I'll post a follow-up if I'm able to successfully complete the XFA form conversion to Acro (or if I'm not successful!). Regards, -Peter Demling Lexington, MA ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sponsored by: SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards: VOTE NOW! Studies have shown that voting for your favorite open source project, along with a healthy diet, reduces your potential for chronic lameness and boredom. Vote Now at http://www.sourceforge.net/community/cca08 _______________________________________________ iText-questions mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/itext-questions Do you like iText? Buy the iText book: http://www.1t3xt.com/docs/book.php Or leave a tip: https://tipit.to/itexttipjar
