OK, thanks. The font is just the standard Helvetica so it should not
need to be embedded; I just need to specify the appropriate point size
in order for the text to fit in the available space.
Some of the fields are multiline text fields ("text areas"). For
those fields, do I need to manually line-break the text that I'm going
to put in those fields in order to lay out the text in the appearance
stream appropriately? I guess I am assuming that I will need to do
that, though I suppose I'll find out shortly. :)
Thanks,
Aaron
On Sun, Jul 24, 2016 at 10:16 AM, Maruan Sahyoun <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi,
>
>> Am 24.07.2016 um 14:35 schrieb Aaron Mulder <[email protected]>:
>>
>> I am filling out a form on an existing PDF document. The base
>> document has /NeedAppearances true and the result is that the text
>> looks different on every viewer. For instance, on some the text is
>> offset vertically or the text is cut off when using a font that works
>> fine on a different viewer.
>>
>> I gather the solution to this is to set /NeedAppearances to false and
>> provide an appearance stream for every field. I don't know much about
>> appearance streams.
>>
>> In looking at the output of the PDFBox examples, it seems that the
>> appearance stream actually writes the field's value as text, e.g. for
>> the form containing the text "Sample field" the appearance stream is:
>>
>> /Tx BMC
>> q
>> 1 1 198 48 re
>> W
>> n
>> BT
>> /Helv 12 Tf
>> 2 20.692 Td
>> (Sample field) Tj
>> ET
>> Q
>> EMC
>>
>> Is there a way to not include the specific text in the appearance
>> stream such that if the user changes the value in the field then the
>> appearance stream will still work?
>
> If the field has a value then this value will be part of the appearance
> stream. But that doesnÄt mean that the value can not change. When the user
> enters new text then the viewer will recalculate the appearance stream and
> the new text will replace the old one.
>
>>
>> Really all I want from the appearance stream is to specify the font
>> and bounds and offset such that the text is in exactly the same place
>> on every viewer and the same font size fits into the available space
>> on every viewer.
>
> The font (/Helv in your example) and font size (12 in your example) are part
> of the fields properties and specified in the default appearance string. This
> will make it into the appearance stream. Unfortunately setting such as bounds
> and offset are not part of the PDF specification but implementation specific.
> So you might get different results with different viewers.
>
> One thing you should also ensure is that the fonts used for forms filling are
> embedded in the PDF so that all viewers can use the same font.
>
>
>>
>> And one more question -- the document has let's say 200 fields, and I
>> only populate maybe 50 of them. If I specify appearance streams for
>> *only* the ones I populate, will that work? If that's the case,
>> should /NeedAppearances be set to true or false?
>
> If the appearance stream for the filled out fields is defined then you should
> set /NeedAppearances to false (or remove the key completely).
>
> BR
> Maruan
>
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Aaron
>>
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