On Wed, 08 Nov 2006 16:37:03 -0800 NoOp <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> dijo: > > 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.
> > 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'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. As it turns out, Adobe failed to send me the link to their website that I have to go to in order to download the free trial. After reading what you said I decided to forget about it. I don't really want Acrobat 7.0 anyway. > 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. The problem with that is that the majority of the students are semi-computer illiterate. I've tried to get them to type with IPA and their resistance is amazing. "I don't know how to do it, therefore it must not be important." They don't even want to bother with hex or decimal codes, or Insert Special Character. They'd rather print out a blank form and fill it in with their handwriting. So the benefit of the PDF form with the characters in the drop-down is that they don't have to know how to type the special characters. In fact, to do the homework, exam, or practice session, they have no choice but to use the drop-down. > You might want to explore using Scribus for this type of work. I'm ahead of you. Someone on an Ubuntu forum already pointed out that Scribus could do "PDF fields" in a document. "PDF fields" is what Scribus calls form controls. Scribus has the same kinds of forms as OOo, except that database connectivity is not an option. However, for my purposes, a simple list is enough. The problem is that Scribus currently suffers from the same limitation as OOo. When they write the PDF fields plugin they hard coded it to use only five different fonts (Courier, Helvetica, Times, Zapf Dingbats and Symbols). Five choices is a lot better than OOo's one choice, but for me it makes no difference. None of the five choices have the IPA characters I need. However, Scribus is developing very quickly, and I communicated with one of the developers about this. It has been added as a feature request and might get implemented fairly quickly. Thanks a million for all your efforts in this matter! --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
