I thought I had it all figured out. I was going to save university professors hours of paper correcting time, and at the same time make it easier for students to learn. I was going to do this by creating editable PDF forms using OOo. I would be a hero. Students and professors would carry me on their backs, shouting my praises. (OK, fantasies are free, so indulge me.)
So today I decided it was time to learn the details. About 9 o'clock this morning I opened a blank document in Writer and popped up the toolbars for forms. Then I set about creating four different kinds of controls on the form (combo boxes, radio buttons, check boxes, and a text box). In the process I created a database to link to the combo boxes. It is now about 8 pm and I have most of it figured out. However, there is one problem that I cannot overcome, and it is a show stopper. The forms are for use in linguistics courses, therefore I must be able to use a Unicode font that has all the IPA characters in it. I have several such fonts installed on my Ubuntu Dapper amd-64 computer, and they work just fine. (The one I decided to use for this form is Junicode, a serif font.) I need the font to be embedded for the controls that I placed on the form. I have done so in the Properties window for each control. When I switch from design view to regular view the font appears correctly in all parts of the OOo document -- the regular text portions and the controls. But after exporting to PDF, the font remains in the text portions of the form, but in each control the font is some kind of sans serif. Whatever it is, it lacks the IPA characters that students need. To reiterate for clarity, the form works perfectly as an OOo document -- the font appears in all places correctly. If I were sending the OOo form to students there would be no problem at all (after they install the Junicode font on their computers, of course). But when exporting to PDF the font is embedded for the text parts of the form (i.e., the instructions), but is lost in the form controls. The export to PDF function is substituting some sans serif font for Junicode in the controls. When I open the PDF in Adobe Reader 7.0 the font in the controls does not display the IPA characters. I attempted to circumvent the problem by using the CUPS-PDF print utility. For those not familiar with it, CUPS-PDF installs a "printer driver" that is really a utility that converts the print stream to a PDF file. You just print to the CUPS-PDF "printer" and it makes the PDF file for you. CUPS-PDF made the PDF file just fine, but it is not at all editable in any portion of the resulting PDF document. I know I could solve the problem if I give hundreds of dollars to Adobe for Acrobat, plus figure out a way to install it under Linux. But I can't afford it, and I think there might be a way to get OOo to do the job if I could figure out what I'm doing wrong. The problem is in the export to PDF function, not in the creation of the form. Anyone have any ideas or suggestions? --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
