I do not know if this is the problem but
Adobe requires you to set an option to
save the fonts with the documents to get
the fonts not to be subsituted with a "random" substitute
Is there any font saving option within Ooo???
----- Original Message -----
From: "NoOp" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Wednesday, November 08, 2006 7:37 PM
Subject: [users] Re: It Works! Re: Forms, Export to PDF, and Fonts
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
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