On Mon, 13 Nov 2006 19:20:10 -0800 NoOp <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> dijo: > > 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:
Because the character is NOT on the dropdown, nor is it available in a text box after exporting to PDF. That's because OOo is hard coded to substitute Helvetica for all form controls upon exporting to PDF. I set the font for the control to Junicode, a font that does have all the characters, and the form control appears fine as long as I am viewing it in Writer. After exporting to PDF the font in the control has become an Adobe Reader sans font. That's because OOo embedded Helvetica for the control (countermanding the properties I set in the document), and Adobe Reader doesn't have Helvetica, so it substituted Adobe sans. End result is that the IPA characters do not appear in the dropdown. If a student types an IPA character in a text box (i.e., using a hex or decimal code), the character does not appear either. > >> 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. Because the programmers who wrote OOo and Scribus do not understand PDF documents. They think there would be a problem if the person reading the form in Adobe Reader did not have the font installed on their computer. Thus, they limited it to "standard" fonts that they assumed everyone would have. Silly thinking. Export to PDF embeds the font by default. The PDF form will appear properly regardless of what computer it is opened on. That's the whole point of PDF (Portable Document Format). There was no more need to limit the font for form controls than for the rest of the document. It does appear that Scribus will remedy the situation fairly quickly. OOo developers, however, do not see the need to change this behavior. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
