John Jason Jordan wrote: > > 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.
Ah, got it. > > 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. That explains a lot. Perhaps it they get more than 8 votes there will be incentive for it to change. > > 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. That would also eliminate PDFCreator in Windows for the printer from OOo - it uses GhostScript. However, it still does a nice job of printing out the filled in PDF so it can be used by students. > > 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. :( I'm pretty sure that I tried that awhile back with Acrobat Distiller 7.0 and I couldn't get it to work. 8.0 is out now so it might, but you'll probably run into the same problem. FWIW I've also tried it with Acrobat 4.0 distiller on Windows and no luck either. In the long run it may be easier to redesign the form; put the special font/characters in the text (they do print when I put them in the text area of my test PDF), and put the question/answers in the dropdowns. Either that or don't use a dropdown but instead simply let them fill in the blanks. So instead of: voiced velar stop _______dropdown w/special char use special char ___________dropdown w/voiced velar stop etc choices > > Much thanks for your help. If you have any other ideas or suggestions, > I'm all ears. You might want to explore using Scribus for this type of work. http://www.tuxmagazine.com/node/1000225 http://wiki.scribus.net/index.php/Get_Started_With_Scribus:10 http://wiki.scribus.net/index.php/Your_first_PDF_form_with_Scribus If you do I would not use the one in the Ubuntu Dapper repository; instead download and install the latest version directly from Scribus: http://www.scribus.net/index.php --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
