[libreoffice-users] Re: Filling PDF forms with LibreOffice

On 01/19/2011 01:01 AM, amine amine wrote:
> Salam NoOp,
>
> but as i said in the title "Filling PDF forms with LibreOffice", i'm looking
> for a solution with LibreOffice because as you certainly may know it's an
> Office suite.
>
> and GIMP is sufficient for doing that, exept that, once the pdf form has
> been edited and exported to PDF, if you open it after that it will be an
> image contained in a PDF and not text contained in a PDF. so it'll be very
> ambarassing to refill all the form once again beacause you've made a mistake
> in the name, age or whatever information you're filling your form with.

With xournal you open the PDF, fill in the form, export to PDF & it is
exported as a proper PDF. You can easily modify the form again using the
xournal file that you've saved as well :-)

> again,
>
> my PDF forms are created with LibreOffice Writer and exported to PDF format.
>
> when it contains only english characters, reopening it with LibreOffice
> Draw, is OK.
>
> when it contains some french characters ç à â ê it's not OK.
>
> when it contains some arabic characters ئ ء ؤ إ لأ لإ  it's not OK.
>
>
> The problem is with handling some special characters and not all the non
> english characters.

The problem that I've found with attempting to use Draw (even in OOo)
for PDF form filling (and modification) is, even with English,
characters will go missing, entire lines will go missing if the font
isn't available, or fonts get substituted. Hence, I gave up on using the
PDF extension for any type of form filling.

That said, I'm not sure it's entirely a Draw issue, see:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/openoffice.org/+bug/244353
[[ooo-build] OpenOffice exports PDF with arabic numerals instead of
regular numbers]

And of course even using cups-pdf & evince had/have issues:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cups/+bug/381788
[[jaunty] cups-pdf no longer embeds fonts in pdf file]
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/poppler/+bug/151608/
[Evince Document Viewer 2.20.0 fails to read Arabic PDFs]

> I'm using LibreOffice-3.3-RC3 with Oracle PDF Import extension on a
> Ubuntu-10.10 32bits machine

When you export the forms to PDF, do you tick 'Embed standard fonts'?
Does that make a difference if you do? If it doesn't, then I'd recommend:

1. Test with OOo DEV300m97 to see if it occurs there as well. If it does
not, then file a bug & include a small test file & screen shots & note
that it works in OOo.
  Keep in mind that you are using an SUN/Oracle extension that is tuned
to OOo to import the PDF into LO Draw, so the issue may be entirely with
the extension. Read the 'Not supported':
http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/en/project/pdfimport

2. Export the form as a hybrid (Create hybrid file). That way when you
open the PDF it's back in Writer for editing. See:
<http://www.oooninja.com/2008/06/pdf-import-hybrid-odf-pdfs-extension-30.html>
[Hybrid ODF-PDF files]
Note that you still use the Oracle PDF Import Extension with this
feature as well.

3. Try xournal... you may like it :-)




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