John Jason Jordan wrote:

> 
> 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.

Not worth the effort that I can tell, but the link is:

http://www.adobe.com/downloads/
  http://www.adobe.com/downloads/#acrobatfamily

> 
>> 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.

I guess that I'm still confused. If the character is on the PDF form and
the dropdown is the "what is this" there should be no need to use
decimal/hex/insert special character at all:

<special character in text> this is a <dropdown with answers>

or

<special character in text> this is a <blank line to fill in by text>

> 
>> 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. 

Interesting. I wonder why there is no way to add another.

This might be of interest:
http://docs.scribus.net/index.php?lang=en&page=fonts1
http://docs.scribus.net/index.php?lang=en&page=fonts2
http://docs.scribus.net/index.php?lang=en&page=fonts3 <==
http://docs.scribus.net/index.php?lang=en&page=fonts4
http://docs.scribus.net/index.php?lang=en&page=fonts5

> 
> Thanks a million for all your efforts in this matter!

Good luck & please followup with what you finally end up doing. I know
that there are a lot of others here that are in a similar situation.

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