From: NoOp <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Wed, 08 Nov 2006 09:23:22 -0800 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Subject: It Works! Re: Forms, Export to PDF, and Fonts
NoOp wrote: >> 2.0.4 (linux) does not fix the problem. I tested briefly last night. >> When I get time I'll try a few other things today. I will also test >> using PDFCreator in Windows; in the past I've had better luck with that. >> I also have Adobe Acrobat (older 4x version) and will give that a try. >Update: I just tried your test_form.pdf in Windows Acrobat Reader 5.0.5 >and the forms function *does* work! I can select the dropdowns, select >the character, check the boxes, click the radio buttons, fill in the >text box, everything. I then print out my filled in document to >PDFCreator as a PDF, and everything is as I filled it in. > >In AR5 (Windows) under Help|About Adobe Acrobat Plugins| I list a plugin >for Forms: AcroFill.api. Note: I've not tried yet in AR7 Windows. >In my AR7 (Unix) I do *not* have this plugin. > >So, it appears that OOo *is* exporting the PDF properly. The problem is >not having an Acrobat Reader "Forms" plugin in AR7 (linux). I'll hunt >around and see if I can find one... However, remember that Adobe only >added the linux version of AR recently, so they may not have gotten >around to adding this plugin yet. Thanks so much for your efforts! However, I fear you missed something: I can get the controls embedded here also. And they work just fine. That is, all the drop-downs work, the text box works, the check boxes and radio buttons work, but the FONTS that I set in the controls are converted to something else. I set the controls to Junicode Regular, 13 points, the same as the rest of the document. The controls appear with that font in the OOo Writer form document. But after exporting to PDF and opening the PDF in Reader 7.0, the fonts in the controls have been converted to something that Reader substituted. (In Reader, look in File > Document Properties.) This is not an overwhelming problem for American users speaking English, but what if you're Central European. Or what if you're a linguistics major and you need the controls to display IPA characters. To see what I am talking about, look at the drop-down controls on page 1. See the dots? Those are missing characters. If OOo PDF export had embedded the Junicode font for the controls those dots would have been characters. Since posting last night I discovered something on the OOo forums: http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=42985 Evidently the problem that I am having was deliberate and there is no plan to change it. At this point it appears pointless to try to get Writer to export the control and include the font. It's going to encode Helvetica for the controls because Writer is hard coded to do so. And Adobe Reader is going to substitute its font for Helvetica, and that font does not have many characters above what American English needs. However, it may be possible to print to a PostScript file and then distill that file with Adobe Acrobat 7.0 or later. I already tried this with the Adobe online PDF generator, but it failed to embed the controls. I e-mailed Adobe Support about it and they replied that creating editable PDFs requires Acrobat 7 or 8, and the latest version you can select on their online PDF creator is 5. They did that deliberately because of Digital Rights Management issues. I also tried GhostScript, but it failed to embed any of the controls. For my next effort I am going to download the free trial of Acrobat 7.0 Professional (Standard won't do it) and install it on my Windows computer. then I'm going to see if I can get the fonts embedded in the controls by printing to Acrobat distiller 7.0. I hate that solution but it may be the only way to get the job done. I have observed that the Junicode font in the controls does print properly when I select something in the controls using the native Writer form document. So the font in the controls is going out into the print stream. Therefore, I should be able to print to file on my Linux computer and distill the .ps file with Acrobat 7.0 on the Windows computer. It's just that I've been wanting to shut down the Windows computer for good. :( Much thanks for your help. If you have any other ideas or suggestions, I'm all ears. And if anyone else has any ideas or wants to see what all the fuss is about, you can download the relevant files and the Junicode font (free) here: http://web.pdx.edu/~johj Thanks again. :) --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
