Hello PoDoFo Community, I am having difficulty understanding why PDF forms created and populated with podofo do not work in Adobe Reader as desired. I wrote code to create a one page PDF with one form field and set text on it. The text is clearly in the form (when viewed with PoDoFoBrowser 0.5 (win32)). Yet when I open the PDF in Adobe Reader (9.2.0, win32), the field appears empty. When I click on the text field my value is visible. When I click off of the field, my value disappears. (My code is below)
I'm using the latest podofo from svn (rev 1199, checked out this morning), and the PDF 1.3 spec from Adobe's web site [1]. I studied the sample code in "podofo/test/FormTest" [2]. I skimmed most of the PDF reference manual, and intently read (twice) section 7.6, "Interactive Forms". My ultimate goal is to write a routine that will read a third party PDF (with a form on it), fill in the fields and save the form. At a later time a user would then load the form into and further edit it, email it and/or print it. When I failed to get this to work with the desired forms (US / IRS tax form "941" [3]), I created a small app to build a custom PDF with a simplified form. I get the same results with both forms. I've viewed both forms inside PoDoFoBrowser. Some annotation elements have different attributes, but they are essentially the same. I have three theories: a) It is simply not possible to construct a PDF form with data pre-populated using "PdfTextField.SetText()". b) I'm doing something wrong. c) I need to set some additional attributes or values in the annotation element, or its parent object, or in the document object itself. At this time I can see only one possible hack: To read the form field's "rects" and create a text overlay in the same position. This is indeed a hack as this will prevent the user from properly editing the form at a later time (prior to them printing or otherwise using it). Although I am using PoDoFoBrowser and Adobe Reader on win32, I am doing my development on Gentoo Linux. This, hopefully, does not matter. I would very much appreciate any suggestions, assistance, etc... If it would be helpful, I can post the "stuff" that PoDoFoBrowser shows inside the forms. However, it is fairly easy to download the "941" form and view it directly. Thank you for your time. [1] http://www.adobe.com/devnet/pdf/pdfs/PDFReference13.pdf [2] https://podofo.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/podofo/podofo/trunk/test/FormTest/FormTest.cpp [3] http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f941.pdf // "main()", "#include" and original error handling omitted for brevity. // "HelloWorld" line shamelessly stolen from the PoDoFo online example. void RunPdfTest (const char *filename) { PdfStreamedDocument doc (filename); PdfPage *pPage = doc.CreatePage (PdfPage::CreateStandardPageSize (ePdfPageSize_Letter)); PdfPainter painter; painter.SetPage (pPage); PdfFont *pFont = doc.CreateFont ("Arial"); pFont->SetFontSize (18.0); painter.SetFont (pFont); painter.DrawText (56.69, pPage->GetPageSize().GetHeight() - 56.69, "Hello World!" ); PdfTextField text (pPage, PdfRect (100, 200, 300, 400), &doc); text.SetFieldName ("text-field"); text.SetText ("test"); text.SetMultiLine (false); painter.FinishPage (); doc.Close(); } ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download Intel® Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev _______________________________________________ Podofo-users mailing list Podofo-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/podofo-users
