MichaelStill2001Michael Still Welcome to the comp.text.pdf frequently asked questions document. If you have any suggestions on how this document could be improved, better answers to questions included, or even a new question, please contact the maintainer, Michael Still at mikal@stillhq.com Whenever the name and email address of a person who has answered a question is known, they have been credited within this document. It should be noted that some people chose to add extra text to their email addresses to confuse spam senders. These extra pieces of text have been retained in this document and will need to be removed manually before sending email. Please note that questions and answers are sometimes editted for readability. I have started marking the answers which have been editted from the version labelled 2001-04. [] denotes a comment from the editor. This document may also be found online at http://www.stillhq.com/cgi-bin/getpage?area=ctpfaq&page=index.htm which also includes past versions of the FAQ. This version of the FAQ covers information up to and including Thu, 3 Jan 2002 10:04:46 GMT and is based on 9076 postings. I am currently quite behind with bringing the latest postings into the FAQ -- there are some 2000 or so waiting in my queue. My apologies for the delay. This edition introduces several new section names, and has moved some answers to more logical locations. Version: 2002-02 This FAQ is maintained by Michael Still, who can be contacted at mikal@stillhq.com Many thanks to Catherine and Andrew for being supportive of Michael whilst he works on this document The following people have provided answers which have been used in this FAQ: 44: Aandi Inston 25: Michael Still 11: Dan Sideen 7: Helge Blischke, Bryan Guignard 6: Rachel Burnsed 4: Thomas Merz 3: Bill Segraves, Scott Robert Ladd, Mark Anderson, Christian Koch, John Farrow, Aaron Watters, Matti Vuori, Dick Margulis, Ken Sharp 2: Alex Cherepanov, Giacomo, mikal, William Alexander Segraves, Louis Vosloo, Filiep Maes, Mark Gavin, Vladimir Katalov, Martin Bailey, Kent Isaksson, Frank M. Siegert, Bob Niland, Arne, Veli Holopainen 1: Jorma Heimonen, laird@gunsmoke.ecn.purdue.edu, Bruno Lowagie, Don Daniels, Rocker95, Klaus Gotthardt, U Berlin, H.Blischke@srz-berlin.de, Guy Vdh, Jim K, Edward Mendelson, Dale Rebgetz, Eckhard Henkel, Andreas Wall, MSD, Dinu Gherman, Don Lancaster, Michael Sweet, Tom Kacvinsky, Vi Wisdom, Dan Cogliano, GDCII, Michael Mantz, Doug Milliken, Miguel Tavares, Timothy L. Jordi, MicroPress, Inc, Mr T, Harvey Turnbull, Diana Diehl, Kevin Ashley, SANFACE Software, Dave Braze, Tore Hanson, Stefan Treutlein, JW, Dave, J.H.M. Dassen (Ray), Matthias Haeusser, Steve Cook, Ross Finlayson, Happy Go Lucky, Mark Lookabaugh, DesQuite, John Deubert, Marc Wieber, Ed Bomke, Dave Bloodgood, Jose Fernando Tepedino, Michael Hemmer, Steve Auerweck, Tiger, Jonathan Weiner, A. Sinan Unur, Ingemar Djurhuus, Jim Driscoll, Philippe Lauwers, Derek B. Noonburg, Jim Ley, John Doherty, Kurt Foss, lvincent, Peter Flynn, Ron Teplitz, JoeZ, mschulz, Pierre Baillargeon, Sanjoy Mahajan, Craig Broadbear, Anders Thulin, John Freund, Mimi Burbank, Jean Piquemal, Paulo Soares, Gunther Schmidt, Robert Anderson, Ross, Mike Bernardo, Chaize Michaël, Frankie Lam, Jens-Uwe Mager, George Johnson, Massimo Brini What are the new features/improvements? [Q24] Too many to list here. Adobe's site presently has a ton of material listing all the new tools and features. Here are a few of my favorites. Workflow automation Database connectivity Online collaboration Much improved javascript editor Great new JavaScript objects and interface control Tools for adding PDF structure XML supportMr T (nert@bobco.com) [A41] We just got our copy of Acrobat 5. First impressions are: 1. If you use forms, you can now use all available fonts, not just the base 13. 2. You can export pdf's to jpeg, tiff, and rtf. The rtf means that you can now create Word documents from PDF documents. We tried it, and the results were OK for text, but poor for anything with complicated formatting, like tables and columns. And non existant for graphics. 3. There are numerous improvements for the colour pre-press market, but we haven't evalutated them yetDan Sideen (dansideen@home.com) [A42] 4.05 has Paper Capture. It is an add-on in 5.x. Paper Capture is OCR. Use Acrobat to scan a doc and edit the doc in Acrobat subject to the rule that you must edit text one line at a time. Very useful when making extra copies of documents. (REMOVEraindoll@ziplip.com) [A43] Adobe have now announced that the Capture plug-in is coming back for v5. It will be a separate download (for v5.00 users anyway) and is slated to be available about June 2001.Mark Anderson (mark@notmeyeardley.demon.co.uk) [A44] It wasn't worth it a few months ago, especially since Adobe removed the OCR capability. I understand they have since added a patch to put this feature back, but limited it's range. I bought it thinking I could use some of the new "bookmark" features, however I had to go back to ver. 4 since I particularly needed OCR (capture). I have yet to reinstall it, however by now it might be worth part of the price of the "upgrade".Tore Hanson (hansont@ameritech.net) [A222] I have seen several eps-files, that Acrobat 4 cannot distill but version 5 can. It seems version 5 can correct several font problems which version 4 cannot handle.Veli Holopainen (veli.holopainen@kaleva.fi) [A223] Is there any way to cut and paste from a pdf to a word document or to another document in the adobe suite? I want to copy text from a pdf and put it somewhere else, but not as an image. [Q26] First put Acrobat into continuous view mode. That way you can copy more than one page at a time, up to the entire document, but subject to clipboard size limits.Dave Braze (davebraze@yahoo.com) [A49] Adobe Acrobat 5.0 also has a save as RTF (a format Word can open) option...Michael Still (mikal@stillhq.com) [A50] In acroreader or acrobat just use the text select tool to select your text, copy & paste in the normal way.Steve Cook (steve.cook@spamulike.bigfoot.com) [A51] I received in the mail a pdf that when over a page, the hand icon has a down arrow on it and it functions to advance forward through the document when you click. I would like to add this feature to my documents but can find no reference to it in the Acrobat User's Guide. Does anyone know how to add this? [Q27] You can do this in Acrobat by using the article tool. It allows you to guide your readers through the document. It is described in the Acrobat User's Guide from page 247 onwards.mschulz (mschulz@bigpond.net.au) [A52] Can anybody tell me if a PDF commandline-tool is available, ie. I would like to execute a line like: PDFPRINT ACRO.PDF PRINTERXX [COPIES=4] resulting in 4 copies of the ARCO.PDF-document on the printer called PRINTERXX [Q28] You can use the Acrobat Reader for printing PDF files via the command line (although xou can't set the number of copies). From the Acrobat Developer FAQ: "Using Command Lines with Acrobat and Acrobat Reader under Windows These are unsupported command lines, but have worked for some developers. There is no documentation for these commands other than what is listed below. You can display and print a PDF file using command lines with Acrobat and Acrobat Reader. AcroRd32.exe filename - Executes the Reader and displays a file. AcroRd32.exe /p filename - Executes the Reader and prints a file. AcroRd32.exe /t path printername drivername portname - Initiates Acrobat Reader, prints a file while suppressing the Acrobat print dialog box, then terminates Reader. The four parameters of the /t option evaluate to path, printername, drivername, and portname (all strings). printername - The name of your printer. drivername - Your printer driver's name. Whatever appears in the Driver Used box when you view your printer's properties. portname - The printer's port. portname cannot contain any "/" characters; if it does, output is routed to the default port for that printer. If using Acrobat, substitute Acrobat.exe in place of AcroRd32.exe in the command lines." Gunther Schmidt (g.schmidt@bigfoot.de) [A53] It has been reported that the acrord32 /t command line option does not work with Acrobat 5.0 It would appear to be a genuine bug, and Adobe apparently doesn't care, because the command-line switches are officially "undocumented". I went back to Acrobat Reader 4 because the /t switch doesn't work in Acrobat Reader 5. [This asnwer has been edited by mikal@stillhq.com]Edward Mendelson (edward_mendelson@ziffdavis.INVALID) [A54] Using Acrobat 4 or 5, or any other program, is it possible to edit an existing PDF file: I need to add 1000 pictures (logos) to 1000 different, existing PDF-files. [Q31] Well, yes, you can edit. One page at a time. You will need patience, or else some product that goes far beyond Acrobat. If using Acrobat, the easiest way to add a logo is to use the Object Touch-up tool, and copy/paste the logo from one PDF (which has it on a blank page, in the right place) to each new page.Aandi Inston (quite@dial.pipex.com) [A57] Is there a parameter for having acrobat reader search for a specific word? If anybody knows some other parameters, can you post them (or just point me to a page where they are listed)? [Q32] No. The Acrobat Developer FAQ lists some of them, but specifically notes that they are unsupported. I would strongly recommend that they are not used, and a supported method used instead. (If you do choose to use them, please don't complain when they stop working on an upgrade.)Aandi Inston (quite@dial.pipex.com) [A58] I am working with Acrobat 4.05 and we have purchased Acrobat 5.0 (not the upgrade, the new one). Do I have to uninstall Acrobat 4 before installing 5.0? [Q33] No, you can keep both. But do NOT uninstall 4 later if you don't do it first. Or, if you do, you will have to reinstall 5.Aandi Inston (quite@dial.pipex.com) [A59] Does pdf involuntarily store information relating to the serial number/author of the acrobat install that was used to create the document? [Q34] No. You can determine (often) the name of the software that produced the document and at what time though.Michael Still (mikal@stillhq.com) [A60] I've just installed Acrobat 4 and now it seems I have 3 different ways to create a PDF from within Word: - Print to the PDF writer - Print to Distiller - Use the "Create Adobe PDF" command on the File menu. How do these differ? Which are the preferred methods in terms of time taken/quality/file size? [Q35] PDFWriter is fast, but not terribly good at graphics. Distiller is general better, but slower. It gives more control to you, and you should spend time understanding its options. Neither will include links, bookmarks etc. Use Create Adobe PDF if you want these features. This will make a larger file of course.Aandi Inston (quite@dial.pipex.com) [A61] We are producing a cd-rom with lots of pdf´s, all indexed by Adobe Acrobat Catalog. The navigation is done in plain HTML. When viewing pdf´s, it is done by the Acrobat Reader (including the search option) embedded in the web browser. The effect is a Acrobat Reader with reduced menus. Now there is no access to the Adobe Acrobat Seach menu item (edit/search/query), which gives us access to the Catalog build index. Anyone out there who knows about some add-on product, which enable the >catalog index of Acrobat Reader called through an internet browser? [Q36] There is unlikely to be any. Search does not work through a browser; it has no programming interface in Acrobat Reader at all; and the programming interface in Acrobat does not allow the way the result list is handled to be changed.Aandi Inston (quite@dial.pipex.com) [A62] Suppose I have a PDF document and a keyword I want to search for in the document. I want to create a hypertext link from an HTML document to this PDF document and have it either go to the instance of the keyword or highlight every instance of this keyword. How can I do this? Will this require products other than the free version of acrobat Reader? [Q37] You can read the highlighting file format first http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/acrosdk/docs/highlt.pdf There are some products which do PDF search and highlight like http://www.dtsearch2.com or you can do it yourself by grapping all text from the pdf file and find the position of words.Dave (davelo@hotmail.com) [A63] As I understand it a PDF supports both raster and vector images. Is there any way in Acrobat 4 to tell what type an image is? As far as I can tell I can't even select an image in Acrobat and act on it. [Q38] You could use Quite A Box Of Tricks. Even the free demo allows you to click on the page. If it is an image you will get information on the image. If it is text, you will get information on that too. If it is neither, nothing will happen.Aandi Inston (quite@dial.pipex.com) [A64] Could someone give me some idea what the difference is between using the paper capture feature of acrobat and the full Acrobat Capture software that costs several hundred dollars? I'm using acrobat 4 at present, and the paper capture feature seems to work terribly. [Q112] Capture is designed for high volume, semi-automated use. But take care! Acrobat's OCR is perfectly capable of good results from good originals. If you are getting poor results it may reflect poor quality originals, "difficult" originals (e.g. maths, coloured text on backgrounds, faxes, many others), or a scanning or post-scanning technique that needs improvement (e.g. poor choice of resolution, saving as a JPEG).Aandi Inston (quite@dial.pipex.com) [A161] I have generated a document using ***insert name of widget*** and I get error messages when viewing it in Adobe Acrobat. The messages are only numbers. How do I find out what they mean? [Q114] Try hitting Ctrl-Ok, which will display a text description of the message for you. Michael Still (mikal@stillhq.com) [A164] Are there any tools to ease access for people who are vision impared? [Q117] Adobe offers a plugin ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/acrobatreader/win/4.x/plugins/accs405.exe "The Adobe Acrobat Access Plug-in 4.05 enables vision impaired users to read Adobe PDF documents in Acrobat 4.0x or Acrobat Reader 4.0x. The Access plug-in supplements the standard Acrobat and Reader display of PDF documents with an alternative view that supports screen-reading applications for Microsoft Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows NT. This view presents the textual content of a PDF file in a separate window. The window contains the text in an approximated reading order. Standard Acrobat features, such as hypertext links, notes, bookmarks, sounds, and movies, are available in the Access view" And it gives you as option export to html or export to txt. I found it far superior to the export capabilities of Omnipage 11 and it is for freeU Berlin (lwassmann@t-online.de) [A169] How can I make Adobe Acrobat faster to load? [Q121] Adobe recommends that you put unused plug-ins in the "Optional" folder. This will mean that they are not loaded automatically on startup.Miguel Tavares (medalha@hotmail.com) [A176] I'm using the Adobe ActiveX from Reader. It has the methods SetPageMode and SetLayoutMode, which are handy. Problem is no documentation as to what values to set the parameters to. I'm sure someone amongst the experts here knows. [Q127] I don't have any documentation, but it's worth mentioning perhaps that there is no documentation for a reason: it is not a developer tool. Adobe created it only to display PDF files in internet explorer, and they don't support any other use. Given that, and that it could stop working as a developer tool with any upgrade, I'd advise people to consider very carefully before starting any development that they have to commit to supporting. Aandi Inston (quite@dial.pipex.com) [A187] I have a lot of documents generated by LaTeX + Acrobat 4.0. The documents also contains a few pages generated by VISIO. Acrobat Reader 4.0 can read these documents perfectly without any problem, but Acrobat Reader (AR) 5.0 cannot properly read them. - AR 5.0 can read only those pages generated by VISIO - If both AR 4.0 and AR 5.0 are installed on a PC, AR 5.0 can read a PDF perfectly after AR 4.0 read it once. Is there any backward compatibility option in AR 5.0? (I cannot find!) [Q132] Ah, this sounds like a font embedding/encoding problem. Ther TrueType '.notdef' glyph is usually represented as a rectangle, where the PostScript .notdef is usually a space. Hmm, yes, looking at the fonts used in your document, I notice that there are fonts like 'CMR12', which are TrueType, and also an embedded subset. These are pretty common Tex fonts. Indeed, opening the file with Acrobat 4 did work properly. However, if I simply exit Reader, it doesn't make it work with Acrobat 5. I guess you must be saving the file. Maybe the full version of Acrobat 4 does this for you, I don't currently have it installed. None of the fonts embedded by Tex actually have a /Encoding applied, and I would guess that Acrobat 4 and Acrobat 5 are defaulting to different Encoding schemes. For Tex, 4 works, and 5 doesn't. Consider these font definitions : 116 0 obj << /Type /Font /Subtype /TrueType /Name /F0 /BaseFont /Arial /FirstChar 31 /LastChar 255 /Widths [ 750 278 278 355 556 556 889 667 191 333 333 389 584 278 333 278 278 556 556 556 556 556 556 556 556 556 556 278 278 584 584 584 556 1015 667 667 722 722 667 611 778 722 278 500 667 556 833 722 778 667 778 722 667 611 722 667 944 667 667 611 278 278 278 469 556 333 556 556 500 556 556 278 556 556 222 222 500 222 833 556 556 556 556 333 500 278 556 500 722 500 500 500 334 260 334 584 750 556 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 750 ] /Encoding /WinAnsiEncoding /FontDescriptor 117 0 R >> 12 0 obj << /Type /Font /Subtype /TrueType /Name /F2 /BaseFont /AJIANI+CMR12 /FirstChar 31 /LastChar 255 /Widths [ 500 913 272 489 816 489 816 761 272 380 380 489 761 272 326 272 489 489 489 489 489 489 489 489 489 489 489 272 272 272 761 462 462 761 734 693 707 747 666 639 768 734 353 503 761 611 897 734 761 666 761 720 544 707 734 734 1006 734 734 598 272 489 272 489 272 272 489 544 435 544 435 299 489 544 272 299 516 272 816 544 489 544 516 380 386 380 544 516 707 516 516 435 489 979 489 489 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 611 816 761 679 652 734 707 761 707 761 500 500 707 571 544 544 816 816 272 299 489 489 489 489 489 734 435 489 707 761 489 883 992 761 272 489 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 ] /FontDescriptor 13 0 R >> The Arial definition is embedded by your Visio page, notice that the Tex font 'CMR12' has no /Encoding..... The possible pre-defined Encodings are : StandardEncoding MacRomanEncoding WinAnsiEncoding PDFDocEncoding I've had a quick try at inserting an Encoding for each of these in the file, and I'm afraid it still didn't work, so there may be a more fundamental problem here. I did run it through a PostScript interpreter, and it printed correctly, which suggests that the default encoding is StandardEncodng, or at least is compatible with it. My suggestion would be to take this to a Tex newsgroup, and see if anyone there can help you, it may be that updating to a newer version of Tex (or whatever it was you used to convert the Tex document to PDF) will solve your problem.Ken Sharp (ken@spamcop.net) [A202] Sorry, but this doesn't tell us much. Which TeX System? How did you create the PDF from the TeX or DVI source? Did you use DVIPS? Did you use Distiller? Did you use pdfTeX? Looking at the file, one notes that it was made by PDFWriter. Strike one. Do not use PDFWriter - always use Distiller. Then it seems that it has CM fonts in TrueType form. Don't use them. Several versions of these are incorrectly made (for example, marked as "text" fonts so they will be reencoded by Windows). They all show up as empty boxes in Acrobat Reader 5. The only quality font in there is Adobe's Arial MT. And it is reencoded to Adobe Standard Encoding! Use quality tools to make PDF. See discussion at http://www.yandy.com/acrobat5.htm for example also http://www.yandy.com/compare.htm Once you strip out the bad CM fonts you get a PDF file that works just fine. I put it up at http://www.yandy.com/download/intro.pdf (it's also substantially shorter than the file it was derived from). Take a look (of course, there are still other problems, like unequal rendering of equal width rules, but that is a problem of your TeX System too hard to fix by editing the PDF file). Louis Vosloo (support@yandy.com) [A204] I edit a journal and we have recently begun to send manucripts to reviewers as PDF files. A reviewer sent back an extensively annotated PDF file with instructions to send it on to the author. Unfortunately, his annotations all identify him (his name is in the annotation title bar). Thus, we cannot send this marked MS to the authors because the reviewer's anonymity would be lost. I looked through the Acrobat documentation but can't find any obvious way to change the authorship (say, to "Reviewer #2") of the annotations. Is there any way of doing that? [Q140] You could export the comments as an FDF file (File > Export), open the FDF in a text editor and perform a Search & Replace operation, and then import the FDF back into a virgin document.George Johnson (geojohn@att.net) [A216] Checked out your suggestion. Works very well! What's very dangerous, is I imported the edited *.fdk back into the source file, and it placed the original annotations back on top of the or- ginal ones! For this reason, you're correct in suggesting that the virgin document be used as the destination. Otherwise, the annotated re- ports will include mirrored notations!!!Happy Go Lucky (haphazzard@earthlink.net) [A217] We're about to upgrade from Office 97 to XP and I'm wondering if there are any potential Acrobat 4 or 5 issues I should know about. [Q148] Have a look at http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q302/5/96.ASPHarvey Turnbull (harvey.turnbull@ntlworld.com) [A230] I know someone who is attempting to create PDFs using Illustrator 9. When they go into Illustrator and try to save the file directly as a PDF (using Acrobat 4), the images look fine, but the text that she's typed loses some quality (looks a little jagged). [Q149] The same problem occurs with Acrobat 5, and it isn't all rasterization. Here's what we know so far (there have been a few brief threads on this topic in various newsgroups, including this one, with three or four contributors, total): If the type in the Illustrator drawing is in front of anything that includes either transparency or certain types of gradients (I've learned there are something like nine different kinds of gradients and they don't all show this effect), Illustrator will convert the type to outlines prior to the Distiller step. If type has been converted to outlines, either because Illustrator did it on its own, pursuant to the preceding paragraph, or because the user did it for other reasons, all hinting information is naturally lost, and each character is just a filled bezier curve. Acrobat looks at each node of the curve and makes the pixel in which that node falls type color (black, if your type is black, for example). When the zoom level is small, all those solid black, unaliased pixels make each character look quite jagged. However, as you zoom in, the shapes get smoother and smoother. At a high magnification, the letters look the same as if they were actually type instead of being rendered into outlines. The upshot is that for printing on a PS printer or sending to a service bureau, most everything works out okay. For printing on a non-PS printer, all bets are off. HOWEVER, it seems that in some cases, parts of a type block do indeed get rasterized. I can't tell you exactly where, but it seems to have to do with the number of layers involved at a given point on the page. So one line of type may begin perfectly normally and halfway along the line turn into a raster image. Adobe is aware of the problem and it is on their worklist for Acrobat 6.Dick Margulis (margulis@fiam.net) [A231] How can I open a pdf-file and show at start a different page ? [Q151] http://<path>/<pdffile>#page=123 Just learned it two days ago from this newsgroup... Michael Hemmer (mhemmer@no_spam_samson.de) [A234] I am interested in knowing what font is being used for a given piece of text in a PDF. How can I do that? [Q156] If you've got the full version of Acrobat, select the text using the TouchUp Text Tool. Then, right-click and select "Attributes". It will show you the name of the font used.Rachel Burnsed (burnsed@bcl-computers.com) [A239] It's not so much the loading time that concerns me, it's the slowness of panning and scrolling in an already opened page. Many of them do contain line art; stuff like mechanical drawings, electrical circuits, etc. [Q159] This leads me to believe you are seeing the exact same problem we observed when moving from 4 to 5. In our case it was electrical schematics which really highlighted the problem. While I haven't checked version 5 of the full product, I would expect it to behave exactly the same as I assume it shares the same drawing engine. We have stuck with 4.05 as its drawing speed for such line art is snappy - near instantaneous on a 750MHz PIII with a Matrox G400 Max. Version 5 was terrible. I sent Adobe a sample file (single page A2 schematic, 70Kb size) where, when zoomed in, a redraw was taking about 3 seconds to complete. I have not checked 5.05.Dale Rebgetz (Dale.Rebgetz@setec.com.au) [A244] We use Word for producing forms, which I then dutifully run thru Distiller to get pdfs. Now I'd like to go to the next stage, which is putting in form fields so people can fill them out onscreen rather than on paper. Now the only option that I can see is that either (a) I get busy with the Acrobat Exchange form tool (boring, and the forms are vveeerryy long) or (b) I get the people who create the forms to put in some marker in Word that gets converted by a Acrobat add-on to Acrobat fields or (c) install Acrobat on form producers' PCs and train them up (not more attractive than (a), really, and it's certainly expensive). Can anyone advise on the possibilities of (b)? This must be a relatively common problem. I've checked whether Exchange converts Word forms into Acrobat ones: no, it doesn't (in v3, not sure about v5). [Q69] Here are your options, and there aren't many. Learn all the intricacies of the Acrobat forms tools. It has many time saving shortcuts you can use. Learning how to duplicate and rename fields effectively can really cut down your development time. Also learn to "borrow" ready made stuff from other forms. You can easily cut your development time in half or less by using these shortcuts. There's an excellent forms tutorial that explains these tricks. It's here: http://www.planetpdf.com/mainpage.asp?webpageid=1155 Since you are using Word, you should seriously consider Caere Omni form. What it does is it opens a Word form and converts it to an Omni form, which can then be saved as a PDF form or HTML form. The conversion is not perfect, but you can expect about a 90% accuracy rate. It will even convert simple form functions and calculations for you. I highly recommend it, and the price is right. Another option is to import your Word files into a PDF savvy app like FrameMaker or PageMaker, and let them perform the PDF conversion. FrameMaker has a feature called PostScript frames which allows you to manually enter the PostScript or pdfmark code required for generating PDF form fields. PageMaker has a third party plugin you can purchase. It simulates the Acrobat forms tool. I have yet to find a way to do this with Ventura. And the last way I know, is to include pdfmarks directly in your Word documents, by inserting them through Word's field codes. Thomas Merz has an excellent pdfmark primer that explains how to do most of these procedures. It's free. Get it here: http://www.pdflib.com/pdfmark/index.htmlBryan Guignard (bryang@sympatico.ca) [A117] Can anyone confirm that it is not possible to put an image (jpg/gif) into a form element? I would be happy to convert the image to pdf and then placing it into the form if that needs be. I want to make a pdf document service on our website that provides our customized data and allows the user to upload their logo to place into the document. At this point, I think we need a form (FDF) which will act as a template container, into which we can populate from the database and HTML form, which will include images..... Can anyone provide some pointers, even if to say, its not possible. [Q70] If you make the form of type Button, and select Icon only to display, you can choose a pdf as the icon. this effectively puts a pdf inside a pdf, and, if the pdf is an image, your problem is solved. Its even easier in Acrobat 5, which allows you to select most bit mapped image formats as icons for buttons. Dan Sideen (dansideen@home.com) [A118] Can I use ASP to collect field values from a pdf form? [Q71] Yes, you can. Put the field values into session variables, then assign the variable name to a form field using the FDFSetValue method available in the FDF toollkit from Adobe. You can code in VBScript (preferred) or Javascript. Here is some sample code that does that, then displays the data in a "master" pdf Set FdfAcX = Server.CreateObject("FdfApp.FdfApp") Dim objFdf Set objFdf = FdfAcX.FDFCreate name = Session("name") address1 = Session("street") & " " & Session("poboxorfloor") address2 = Session("city") & " " & Session("province") & " " & Session("postalcode") title1 = Session("title1") title2 = Session("title2") email = Session("email") objFdf.FDFSetValue "name", name, Off objFdf.FDFSetValue "title1", title1, Off objFdf.FDFSetValue "title2", title2, Off objFdf.FDFSetValue "address1", address1, Off objFdf.FDFSetValue "address2", address2, Off objFdf.FDFSetValue "email", email, Off objFdf.FDFSetFile "http://warehouse.informco.com/asp_projects/liberty/lib06_D.pdf" Response.ContentType = "application/vnd.fdf" Response.BinaryWrite objFdf.FDFSavetobuf objFdf.FDFClose Set objFdf = Nothing Set FdfAcX = Nothing Dan Sideen (dansideen@home.com) [A119] Many forms are available in PDF format. I was wondering if there is a package that will allow the user to fill them out onscreen before printing them out? Note that I am not looking for the user to edit them, only to fill the blanks. [Q72] Acrobat can make any (unprotected) PDF file into a fillable form. Try for instance http://www.quite.com/box/qboxbuy1.pdf (it's an order form, but don't worry, you'd have to print and fax it to order).Aandi Inston (quite@dial.pipex.com) [A120] Acrobat Reader, if the forms already have fillable form fields. Acrobat (full distribution), if you need to add any fields, including submit/import methods. Once you've added the required fields, Acrobat Reader, operating as a plugin in your browser, as well as a live TCP/IP connection, is enough to fill, submit, and import data with your form. If you've deduced this means you can save form data (not PDF, but FDF), using Acrobat Reader, you are correct. See http://segraves.tripod.com/index3.htm for a couple of simple examples. You DO NOT have to be connected to the internet to do this. It works fine with a web server running on the same computer with the browser, i.e., "localhost". Bill Segraves (wsegrave@mindspring.com) [A121] Could you please tell wheter and how it is possible to use CGI to fill in a PDF-form [Q73] Yes. Most easily, by the CGI generating an FDF file and delivering that.Aandi Inston (quite@dial.pipex.com) [A122] No and Yes! No: CGI can't do it, as it is a standard, i.e. Common Gateway Interface. Yes: You could write a script in a CGI-compliant language, e.g., Perl, that would generate a FDF file with the field names and associated values in it. For an example, please see http://segraves.tripod.com/index3.htm. You can see the required format of the FDF by simply submitting a blank form.Bill Segraves (wsegrave@mindspring.com) [A123] Get the adobe FDF toolkit from www.adobe.com. It contains Activex controls and is useable in C++, VB, VBS, ASP and Java to automate the creation of separate fdf files. The populated forms can then easily be displayed inside a browser just by pointing to the fdf. This loads the "parent" pdf, and fills the fields.Dan Sideen (dansideen@home.com) [A124] When I do a setValue("fieldname", a Java String, false) if the java string has a french character inside (like an accented character), they are transformed in the document and not property I use the Times Roman font in the fields. [Q74] The Java version of the FDF toolkit is horribly broken with respect to special characters. It uses the Java Native Interface (JNI) for attaching C libraries to Java, and the JNI relies on UTF-7 encoding. This doesn't seem to be implemented in the FDF toolkit, so the Java FDF toolkit is unusable from a European point of view. I haven't yet tested the new version 5 of the FDF toolkit.Thomas Merz (tm@pdflib.com) [A125] When I create the form with the full version of Acrobat 5.0 using a java script -- the email function works great. When I access the form with Acrobat Reader 5.0 the function does not work. Does anyone have any recommendations on the best way to email forms using the Reader? [Q75] Use a CGI or ASP. Except in very limited circumstances (centrally controlled intranets) sending direct e-mail is completely impractical. This limitation is nothing to do with Acrobat.Aandi Inston (quite@dial.pipex.com) [A126] You should forget the idea of sending e-mail directly from the client for at least two reasons. 1. You cannot reliably send e-mail from user's machines. Millions of people do not have working e-mail programs, relying instead on services like Hotmail. Others use e-mail programs that can't be automated. 2. The free Acrobat Reader can't e-mail. So, what you do instead is have your web process (typically an ASP or CGI) send the mail. However, it won't have access to the whole form, only an FDF file.Aandi Inston (quite@dial.pipex.com) [A166] In the submit button on my PDF form I reference the URL of my Uniface program. In my Uniface program I then expect the FDF data to be in the first parameter/input to the form. But I only get the first line of the FDF file! Could someone explain to me how the submit action works with the PDF file and how is parses data to a CGI program. [Q118] The entire FDF file is generated and sent as a single stream of data to the web server. It is not sent as lines (http has no concept of line breaks in the data portion). If you don't get the whole thing, this must be a problem with your chosen interface language/system. Possibly, there's a way to get more data. Possibly, the line endings in the FDF upset the development system (they could be CR, CRLF or LF; a program must be cabable of understanding all the combinations. Aandi Inston (quite@dial.pipex.com) [A170] What is FDF, what's it for and where does it come from? [Q126] FDF = Forms Data Format It is an ASCII based file format. It's designed to hold the data a user fills into a PDF form so it can be submitted to a web server for processing. Also, it can contain processed data that a web server can send back to the user. The most common way of creating an FDF file is to fill out a PDF form and click the SUBMIT button. This is the only option if you are using Acrobat Reader. However if you have the full commercial Acrobat package you also have an option to save FDF file(s) to a local disk. A special version of FDF is also used to store PDF comments data. One big advantage FDF has over regular HTML forms data is that it can contain vector and bitmap graphics as well as text. The PDF specification document contains the entire FDF specification. It's a free download (7 megs) from the Adobe website.Bryan Guignard (bryang@sympatico.ca) [A185] There are a lot of fillable PDFs floating around now. The problem is, with Acrobat Reader, you can fill in the form but it doesn't allow you to save the data. What's the minimum product that will allow the user to fill in a form, save the data to an FDF, retrieve it and print the filled-in form? [Q147] Acrobat Reader to fill in the form and submit the form data to a CGI server, which can be on the same computer as the User, if need be. A one-line Perl script to convert the URL-encoded name=value pairs to FDF, returning same to the User's browser. Although a one-line Perl script can do the job, it is hardly readable. At http://segraves.tripod.com/index3.htm, you'll find samples of what can be done with this approach. The Perl scripts that do the job are a dozen or so lines of code, depending on whether null values are dropped or kept in the result, according to specific needs. This technology is used routinely for forms with hundreds of form fields. William Alexander Segraves (wsegrave@mindspring.com) [A228] Adobe Acrobat Approval. Just recently released. (zevevet@hotmail.com) [A229] Are there are things I should be aware of when generating FDFs via a CGI on a webserver? [Q162] A couple of suggestions: You may wish to write a program/script to generate the FDF in the prescribed format. Get the script working from the command line before you try to implement it on a web server, fi that's your approach. You may wish to use care in the choice of the Content-type: of what you send back to your browser from a CGI script on a web server. MSIE5.X (and6) doesn't treat Content-type: text/plain kindly, as it ignores your specified Content-type: statement and attempts to guess the Content-type: from what's inside the data. This is bad because parts of the FDF look something like HTML tags. MSIE mangles it. See the form versions on http://segraves.tripod.com/index2.htm for a Content-type: text/html workaround for the MSIE problem using (obsolete) tags to wrap the plain text FDF data, forcing MSIE to display it as example text. Of course, if all you wish to do is fill the PDF form, use the appropriate Content-type: application/vnd.fdf, together with, IIRC, the required "#FDF" at the end of the URL, if the URL-encoded form data originates from a PDF.William Alexander Segraves (wsegrave@mindspring.com) [A249] I would know what is the size per page of a pdf document when using a scanner : a) text only b) text and pictures [Q84] Impossible to say. It depends first and most importantly on the resolution. 400 dpi is 1600% larger than 100 dpi. Beyond that everything depends on the kind of original, other scanning settings, and how you make the PDF. DON'T scan directly to Acrobat UNLESS you run Paper Capture.Aandi Inston (quite@dial.pipex.com) [A139] I have tried to make a decent pdf but quality and size is hard to get into an acceptable range. I've tried to scan an original consisting of 5 pages clean quality paper document (A4) but the result becomes a 1.7MB PDF - readable but poor and ragged screen text. Acceptable when printing but the byte size is hardly acceptable for the web? [Q85] We find an a4 page, once G4 fax compressed (CCITT Group 4) is about 50kb.Michael Still (mikal@stillhq.com) [A140] Pure scans are rarely suitable for the web. They are too large. That is a key reason to use Paper Capture. However, you may be OK with a pure black and white scan. If you are not going to run Paper Capture, do NOT scan direct to Acrobat. Use Distiller. Scan to Acrobat (and import images to Acrobat 4) ONLY as a preparation for Paper Capture.Aandi Inston (quite@dial.pipex.com) [A141] I've noticed a strange thing about scanning int Acrobat: Scanned (grayscale) the first of 5 A4 docs, saved it and it was 51KB. Then, not altering any settings, I scanned all 5 pages consecutively and saved the PDF was 2MB. I don't get the math here! Seems to be a waste of time to scan import directly into Acrobat.Kent Isaksson (kentisaksson@netscape.net) [A142] How reliable is Paper Capture at OCRing scanned text? [Q86] Paper Capture is good but it really doesn't produce a reliable result which is the case of all OCR programs I've seen. It mistakes 0 for O and 6 for 8 etc and production hours soars.Kent Isaksson (kentisaksson@netscape.net) [A143] This may be obvious, but OCR stands for "Optical Character Recognition" It will only deal with text, and then only text that is clean enough so it can recognize it and then only text that does not include math or non-alphabetical symbols. So the pictures will not be reduced in size, and the text will only be reduced if itmanaged to actually "OCR" it.Louis Vosloo (support@YandY.com) [A144] I'm just tired of the bland icons that Adobe serves up for use when creating bookmarks. Is there a way to make different symbols or perhaps even colors for use in the bookmarks sections I use pagemaker and photshop to create pdf files and the default bookmarks take away from the overall look and feel. [Q88] Acrobat 5 allows you to specify text formatting such as Bold, Italic, and different colors for the text part of bookmarks. I'm not aware of any way to change the icon. it would be nice if Acrobat had some different bookmark icons to choose from, the way you can change text annot icons.Bryan Guignard (bryang@sympatico.ca) [A146] Versions of Acrobat prior to 5.0 do not understand color entry in the outlines (or text styles); they ignore them.MicroPress, Inc (support@micropress-inc.com) [A147] I'm trying to make a simple VB program that silent prints a given PDF file. [Q89] Here is a VB routine that use DDE and works with Reader 4. Note that you must start Acrobat or Reader first, and that FormsHome is a global variable defined elsewhere.. Sub Printit(FileToPrint As String) 'Print a file using Acrobat Dim sCmd As String 'command string to pass via DDE Dim FullName As String ' fully qualified file name FullName = FormsHome + "" + FileToPrint sCmd = "[FilePrintSilent(" & FullName & ")]" frmFindForm.lblDDE.Caption = "Printing..." & FileToPrint frmFindForm.lblDDE.LinkTopic = "Acroview|Control" frmFindForm.lblDDE.LinkItem = "" If frmFindForm.lblDDE.LinkMode <> 2 Then frmFindForm.lblDDE.LinkMode = 2 End If Rem frmFindForm.lblDDE.LinkTimeout = 1 frmFindForm.lblDDE.LinkExecute sCmd frmFindForm.lblDDE.LinkMode = 0 frmFindForm.lblDDE.Caption = "" frmFindForm.lblDDE.LinkMode = 2Dan Sideen (dansideen@home.com) [A148] How can I get a count of the number of words in a PDF file? [Q91] If you upgrade to Acrobat 5, you can then use a simple javascript to count words. It's very easy and works well for me.Bryan Guignard (bryang@sympatico.ca) [A151] There is an accessibility plugin from Adobe that can export the contents to text format, and that should be easy enough to count words fromAnders Thulin (Anders.X.Thulin@telia.se) [A152] How do I create a PDF with just a blank page in it? [Q92] With your word processor, distill an empty page.Matti Vuori (mvuori@koti.soon.fi) [A153] You could Distill a job like this : %!PS showpage with Acrobat 5, but a dim memory suggests that this may not work in Acrobat 4. In which case, I think you need to start with a simple job like : %!PS /Helvetica findfont 20 scalefont setfont 100 100 moveto (delete me) show showpage And then delete the text in Acrobat. If you 'save as' then you should eliminate the deletion totally.Ken Sharp (ken@spamcop.net) [A154] http://www.planetpdf.com/mainpage.asp?webpageid=480Bryan Guignard (bryang@sympatico.ca) [A155] There is an example program in the Panda distribution (http://www.stillhq.com) that creates a PDF just containing a blank page.Michael Still (mikal@stillhq.com) [A156] I have a user who is complaining that she cannot view, print or save PDFs with WebTV. Is this true? [Q142] VERY true. WebTV does NOTt have an operating system that supports PDF's among other things. It was never designed as a computer. Here are some WEBTV links http://help.webtv.net/ http://developer.webtv.net/design/tools/viewer/instructions/Default.htm http://www.geocities.com/ResearchTriangle/8795/links.htmlDon Daniels (viewelk@NOJOYINSPAMavci.net) [A219] Is there an easy way to turn a PDF into a TIFF [or other raster / bitmap files]? I've tried exporting as an EPS then opening it in Photoshop, but Photoshop is giving me an error message. [Q64] I just did it with Illustrator 9.Jim K (jkajpust@concentricRATS.net) [A105] Try using ghostscript from http://www.ghostscript.comMichael Still (mikal@stillhq.com) [A106] Try Konvertor_pdf2xxx (http://www.logipole.com)Jean Piquemal (j.piquemal@wanadoo.fr) [A107] BCL Computers' Freebird software is available as a command line program. Freebird converts PDF to TIFF, JPEG, and BMP. For more information, visit our website at http://www.bcl-computers.comRachel Burnsed (burnsed@bcl-computers.com) [A108] Try ghostscript, e.g.: gs -sDEVICE=jpeg -sOutputFile=temp.%03d.jpg -c save pop -f your_file.pdf This will create one jpg file for every page, the "%03d" being replaced by a 3 digit page count.Helge Blischke (H.Blischke@srz-berlin.de) [A109] gs command line options: ad b: -r300 ad c,d: -sDEVICE=png... -sOutputFile=filepg%03d.png (where the "..." denote one of the variants of the png devices) ad a: -c save pop -f your_pdf_file (the "-c save pop" recommended but nor essentially necessary) ad e: not possigle by command line switches. You'd have to write a PostScript wrapper that determines the current page size and orientation (using the BeginPage approach). Helge Blischke (H.Blischke@srz-berlin.de) [A175] I'm trying to convert TIFF files to PDF files. Preferably, I'd like to do this on a Unix (Solaris) server, and it definately has to be something that can run in the background, unattended. [Q65] PDFlib does this. And yes, we will answer your support mails :-) There's also a dedicated PDFlib mailing available.Thomas Merz (tm@pdflib.com) [A110] Panda is a free (as in GNU GPLed) API which runs on various Unices, Linux and Windows and can do this sort of conversion work. Have a look at http://www.stillhq.com for more detailsMichael Still (mikal@stillhq.com) [A111] `convert' (part of of the ImageMagick tools) can translate almost any image format to almost any other. So `convert your.tiff your.pdf' will do what you want. I just tried it on a tiff file lying around and it worked fine. Convert is tremendously useful. On Linux it is part of the ImageMagick RPM package. For Solaris I guess you have to get the source and compile. If rpm runs under Solaris, you might be able to get the src rpm and do rpm --rebuild ImageMagic...src.rpm where the ... depend on what version you get. Go to and you'll be redirected to page pointing to tons of versions of the RPM (for various releases of many different linux distributions). They list http://www.imagemagick.org as the source for the software but it seems to be down right now. Sanjoy Mahajan (sanjoy@skye.ra.phy.cam.ac.uk) [A112] You can use "DaVince Tools" at http://www.davince.com. The tiff2pdf converter does exactly what you specified, except for the hidden text (are you referring to OCR?). It does recursion, 1 to 1 and many to 1 PDF conversion and thumbnail generation.Dan Cogliano (dan@davince.com) [A208] How can I convert my PDF documents to something I can edit in a text editor? [Q66] You could convert the PDF file to another format. BCL Computers' Drake software will convert PDF to RTF for editing in Word; however, it will also preserve page breaks. If you use BCL Magellan for converting PDF to HTML, and select the "HTML3" option, you should get an output file which can be opened and edited in Word. Free demos of these Acrobat plug-ins are available at http://www.bcl-computers.com.Rachel Burnsed (burnsed@bcl-computers.com) [A113] You can convert the PDF file to test with ghostscript. http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/A. Sinan Unur (asu1@cornell.edu) [A196] Try xpdf, "pdftotext" is your friend. http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/ Frank M. Siegert (frank@this.net) [A198] Acrobat 5 does a nice job of this. Also create RTF files.Dan Sideen (dansideen@home.com) [A200] There are several ways to get PDF content into Word. A few options: Acrobat 5 has a "Save as RTF" feature. This exports the text with little formatting. BCL Computers' Jade and Drake software allow you to convert PDF to RTF. Jade requires that you manually select the areas of text, tables, and graphics to convert; Drake automatically converts the entire file to RTF, preserving the layout and text formatting from the PDF. Free demos are available online at http://www.bcl-computers.com. PDFZone (http://www.pdfzone.com) should list other PDF conversion tools as well.Rachel Burnsed (burnsed@bcl-computers.com) [A240] My question is how to convert a html file into pdf file. Are there any free-soft for doing this? [Q67] HTMLDOC does this: http://www.easysw.com/htmldoc/Michael Sweet (mike@easysw.com) [A114] How can I convert my MS Office documents to PDF? [Q68] [Have a look at Adobe Distiller, and the Distiller like products listed in the Products not from Adobe section]Michael Still (mikal@stillhq.com) [A115] You should try the Sowedoo Easy PDf converter that enables you to convert a batch of Office files. Have a look at www.sowedoo.comChaize Michaël (mc@sowedoo.com) [A116] ImageToPDF for Excel version 1.0 has been tested on Win 95/98SE and Excel 97/2000. This macro is free and will/is: Batch convert image files supported by Adobe Acrobat versions 4 and 5. Fill Document Info fields. Create Thumbnails Set the file to Standard Open, Bookmarks or Thumbnails. Information placed on the spreadsheet is PDFWorkshop Friendly. http://freepdf.homestead.com/files/ImageToPDFver1_0.zip Tiger (saccuzzo@home.com) [A209] I have a problem in distilling postscript documents produced with LATEX. The pdf doesn't look good on the screen, althaugh the printed document is perfect. [Q116] Take a look at "Creating quality Adobe PDF files from TeX with DVIPS" by Kendall Whitehouse/EMERGE http://www.math.hawaii.edu/~ralph/MathOnWeb/TeXPDF.htmlAlex Cherepanov (alexcher@erols.com) [A168] How can I convert from XML to PDF? [Q123] Check out http://www.xmlpdf.com/overview.htmlJohn Farrow (john.farrow@xmlpdf.com) [A180] java -cp $classpath org.apache.xalan.xslt.Process -IN myfile.xml -XSL mystyle.xsl -OUT newfile.fo MSXML will allow you todo the exact same thing for except it is a COM object. The transformation would be performed by XSL.GDCII (miles@netset.com) [A183] How do I convert a PS file into a PDF? [Q128] Try ps2pdf if you are using a Unix iteration...Michael Still (mikal@stillhq.com) [A192] If you want to convert more than one PS file into a single PDF, then try: gs -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=your.pdf -c save pop -f file1.ps file2.psHelge Blischke (H.Blischke@srz-berlin.de) [A193] How do I convert PDF documents into BMP files? [Q141] Try pdf2bmp. See http://www.tinaja.com/psutils/pdf2bmp.psl for the sourcecode and http://www.tinaja.com/psutils/pdf2bmp.bmp for the demo.Don Lancaster (don@tinaja.com) [A218] I am in search of a server side solution for converting RTF or MS Word docs to PDF. The proposed solution is to be deployed on an UNIX platform. [Q161] For RTF, you could use unrtf (http://freshmeat.net/projects/unrtf/) to convert to PostScript, and run ps2pdf on the result to get PDF. For MS Word, try wvWare (http://wvware.sourceforge.net/).J.H.M. Dassen (Ray) (usenet@zensunni.demon.nl) [A248] I've created my own ToolButton in the default ToolBar but I'm not able to load the icon I've designed. I'm using the AVToolButtonNew method. [Q25] What are the attributes of the icon: - type (bitmap, icon, ...) - size - colours?Aandi Inston (quite@dial.pipex.com) [A45] The icon type is Icon the size is 18x18 with 256 colours.Giacomo (x-ray69@usa.net) [A46] In my project it is a Bitmap, not Icon. This may be critical. Mine is also 20 x 20 with 16 colours. This may be less important. Refer to (I think) the ImageSel project; the documentation on this point is poor.Aandi Inston (quite@dial.pipex.com) [A47] It displays just a question mark insted of my icon. I've also tryed to convert the .ico file into a bitmap and load it using the same procedure as shown in ImageSel project. No way. I'm banging my head on the wall... I need it to work out!Giacomo (x-ray69@usa.net) [A48] I have a plug-in that adds a text banner to the foot of each page in a PDF. How do I correctly add a font resource, e.g. Arial, to the PDF so that the banner prints correctly. The PDFs are straight bitmap conversions so have not font info. [Q78] If you are using the Cos layer this is an interesting and serious challenge. If you are using the PDFEdit layer, this does include options to create and embed a font from a "system" (i.e. installed) font. Since Arial is a virtual clone of Helvetica, that particular example would not be worthwhile. The base fonts like Helvetica are guaranteed to print without embedding.Aandi Inston (quite@dial.pipex.com) [A132] PDF 1.3 has documented a new "Mask" key that provides explicit masking ability. This is supposed to allow you to embed an image (say, a jpeg) along with a 1 bit-per-sample mask that indicates where the jpeg should and should not appear on the page. I haven't been able to get this to work -- the image just renders without respecting the mask. Does anyone have any experience with this feature? The PDF reference does not have any sample code that does this, so I would be interested in any examples you could throw my way. [Q4] It would be easier if you provided an excerpt of the PDF you generated. Don't forget to put the ImageMask dictionary entry in the mask image, the mask's BitsPerComponent to 1, and no color space.Pierre Baillargeon (pb@artquest.net) [A9] And another thing I noticed about legal masks is that the mask image XObject appears in the resource dictionary for the page it appears on.Ed Bomke (edb@discryptic.com) [A10] Here are some fragments from one that works: 25 0 obj << /Type /XObject /Subtype /Image /Width 317 /Height 299 /BitsPerComponent 1 /ImageMask true /Length 524 /Filter /CCITTFaxDecode /DecodeParms << /K -1 /Columns 317 >> >> stream 26 0 obj << /Type /XObject /Subtype /Image /Mask 25 0 R /Width 317 /Height 299 /BitsPerComponent 8 /ColorSpace /DeviceRGB /Length 95613 /Filter /DCTDecode >> stream Aandi Inston (quite@dial.pipex.com) [A11] I'm looking for a piece of code to do ASCII85 encoding/decoding. Does anyone know where to get this? [Q6] ftp://ftp.webcom.com/pub/haahr/src/encode85.c ftp://ftp.webcom.com/pub/haahr/src/decode85.cTom Kacvinsky (tjk@ams.org) [A15] The text of the file ftp://ftp.webcom.com/pub/haahr/src/encode85.c: /* encode85 -- convert to ascii85 format */ #include <stdio.h> #define atoi(s) strtol(s, 0, 0) static unsigned long width = 72, pos = 0, tuple = 0; static int count = 0; void init85(void) { printf("<~"); pos = 2; } void encode(unsigned long tuple, int count) { int i; char buf[5], *s = buf; i = 5; do { *s++ = tuple % 85; tuple /= 85; } while (--i > 0); i = count; do { putchar(*--s + '!'); if (pos++ >= width) { pos = 0; putchar(' '); } } while (i-- > 0); } void put85(unsigned c) { switch (count++) { case 0: tuple |= (c << 24); break; case 1: tuple |= (c << 16); break; case 2: tuple |= (c << 8); break; case 3: tuple |= c; if (tuple == 0) { putchar('z'); if (pos++ >= width) { pos = 0; putchar(' '); } } else encode(tuple, count); tuple = 0; count = 0; break; } } void cleanup85(void) { if (count > 0) encode(tuple, count); if (pos + 2 > width) putchar(' '); printf("~> "); } void copy85(FILE *fp) { unsigned c; while ((c = getc(fp)) != EOF) put85(c); } void usage(void) { fprintf(stderr, "usage: encode85 [-w width] file ... "); exit(1); } extern int getopt(int, char *[], const char *); extern int optind; extern char *optarg; int main(int argc, char *argv[]) { int i; while ((i = getopt(argc, argv, "w:?")) != EOF) switch (i) { case 'w': width = atoi(optarg); if (width == 0) width = ~0; break; case '?': usage(); } init85(); if (optind == argc) copy85(stdin); else for (i = optind; i < argc; i++) { FILE *fp = fopen(argv[i], "r"); if (fp == NULL) { perror(argv[i]); return 1; } copy85(fp); fclose(fp); } cleanup85(); return 0; } Michael Still (mikal@stillhq.com) [A246] The text of the file ftp://ftp.webcom.com/pub/haahr/src/decode85.c: /* decode85 -- convert from ascii85 format */ #include <stdio.h> static unsigned long pow85[] = { 85*85*85*85, 85*85*85, 85*85, 85, 1 }; void wput(unsigned long tuple, int bytes) { switch (bytes) { case 4: putchar(tuple >> 24); putchar(tuple >> 16); putchar(tuple >> 8); putchar(tuple); break; case 3: putchar(tuple >> 24); putchar(tuple >> 16); putchar(tuple >> 8); break; case 2: putchar(tuple >> 24); putchar(tuple >> 16); break; case 1: putchar(tuple >> 24); break; } } void decode85(FILE *fp, const char *file) { unsigned long tuple = 0; int c, count = 0; for (;;) switch (c = getc(fp)) { default: if (c < '!' || c > 'u') { fprintf(stderr, "%s: bad character in ascii85 region: %#o ", file, c); exit(1); } tuple += (c - '!') * pow85[count++]; if (count == 5) { wput(tuple, 4); count = 0; tuple = 0; } break; case 'z': if (count != 0) { fprintf(stderr, "%s: z inside ascii85 5-tuple ", file); exit(1); } putchar(0); putchar(0); putchar(0); putchar(0); break; case '~': if (getc(fp) == '>') { if (count > 0) { count--; tuple += pow85[count]; wput(tuple, count); } c = getc(fp); return; } fprintf(stderr, "%s: ~ without > in ascii85 section ", file); exit(1); case ' ': case ' ': case ' ': case ' ': case '': case 'f': case '': case 0177: break; case EOF: fprintf(stderr, "%s: EOF inside ascii85 section ", file); exit(1); } } void decode(FILE *fp, const char *file, int preserve) { int c; while ((c = getc(fp)) != EOF) if (c == '<') if ((c = getc(fp)) == '~') decode85(fp, file); else { if (preserve) putchar('<'); if (c == EOF) break; if (preserve) putchar(c); } else if (preserve) putchar(c); } void usage(void) { fprintf(stderr, "usage: decode85 [-p] file ... "); exit(1); } extern int getopt(int, char *[], const char *); extern int optind; extern char *optarg; int main(int argc, char *argv[]) { int i, preserve; preserve = 0; while ((i = getopt(argc, argv, "p?")) != EOF) switch (i) { case 'p': preserve = 1; break; case '?': usage(); } if (optind == argc) decode(stdin, "decode85", preserve); else for (i = optind; i < argc; i++) { FILE *fp = fopen(argv[i], "r"); if (fp == NULL) { perror(argv[i]); return 1; } decode(fp, argv[i], preserve); fclose(fp); } return 0; } Michael Still (mikal@stillhq.com) [A247] I need to obtain samples of streams that are encoded with each of the types of filters that PDF 1.3 supports. Is there a "test bank" anywhere? Ideally, the streams would be fairly small to facilitate debugging. Some of them, like FlateDecode and CCITTFaxDecode are easy to find. But for example, I haven't been able to locate an ASCIIHexDecode stream anywhere. [Q11] Have you tried the spec? There is an examples appendix, as well as many examples spread throughout the document. I can't check your specific example for you, as my copy is at work, but you should be fine.Michael Still (mikal@stillhq.com) [A20] What APIs are available, and under what terms? [Q3] PDFLib, free for non-commercial use, http://www.pdflib.com ClibPDF, free for non-commercial use, http://www.fastio.com Panda, open source / free (GPL), http://www.stillhq.com ReportLab, open source / free (BSD license), http://www.reportlab.comMichael Still (mikal@stillhq.com) [A8] We are pleased to announce the release of version 1.0 of the XMLPDF library for Java. The preview period for this product has been completed and the first production version has been released. This library converts XML to PDF including support for: - complex table formatting including nested tables - JPEG and PNG images - automatic pagination of text and tables - text kerning - Type 1 and TrueType fonts including embedding - defining a document template in XML and merging of data from a separate XML source - server-side use in Web and Application servers A quick overview of capabilities is at http://www.xmlpdf.com/overview.html. XMLPDF retails for US$ 99 per developer seat. For information on source licences contact sales@xmlpdf.com.John Farrow (john.farrow@xmlpdf.com) [A194] I've made an inexpensive (149 USD), royalty free component to create PDF files with bookmarks, images (jpg), standard base 14 fonts, vector drawing... It has a very small footprint; the Delphi version compiles in the exe and the OCX is only 350 Kb in size. Developers can distribute freely, royalty free applications with PDF creation features. Very fast (1000 pages = 15 secs on a old Celeron 400), no DLL Hell, no acrobat needed. If interested visit www.dreamscape.it Massimo Brini (brinim@tiscalinet.it) [A214] I got a few documents looking good and at a reasonable size for the final use. But months later I have to re-issue and I can't repeat the results. Other than trial and error, is there a utility or steps to determine the compression options used in a PDF? [Q5] Open the PDFs using a txt editor which can afford binary data (like UltraEdit on Winxx) and search for the "/Filter" keywords.Helge Blischke (H.Blischke@srz-berlin.de) [A12] http://www.enfocus.com/plugins.htm and look for the free Enfocus Browser plug-in. Enfocus Browser allows you to navigate the low-level object hierarchy in a PDF file, and view the PDF page description for a particular page.Filiep Maes (filiepm@enfocus.be) [A13] Our Quite A Box Of Tricks product will tell you the compression used, image by image. This includes the level of JPEG used. This can be done with the free demo.Aandi Inston (quite@dial.pipex.com) [A14] What mailing lists are available for PDF developers? [Q7] You could try some of the following: - comp.text.pdf - PDFDev (http://www.pdfzone.com) - PlanetPDF developer's forum (http://www.planetpdf.com)Aandi Inston (quite@dial.pipex.com) [A16] Encrypted PDFs when printed have the following in them: % Removing the following eight lines is illegal, subject to the Digital Copyright Act of 1998. mark currentfile eexec 54dc5232e897cbaaa7584b7da7c23a6c59e7451851159cdbf40334cc2600 30036a856fabb196b3ddab71514d79106c969797b119ae4379c5ac9b7318 33471fc81a8e4b87bac59f7003cddaebea2a741c4e80818b4b136660994b 18a85d6b60e3c6b57cc0815fe834bc82704ac2caf0b6e228ce1b2218c8c7 67e87aef6db14cd38dda844c855b4e9c46d510cab8fdaa521d67cbb83ee1 af966cc79653b9aca2a5f91f908bbd3f06ecc0c940097ec77e210e6184dc 2f5777aacfc6907d43f1edb490a2a89c9af5b90ff126c0c3c5da9ae99f59 d47040be1c0336205bf3c6169b1b01cd78f922ec384cd0fcab955c0c20de 000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 Which stops Distiller from converting to PDF. What is it? [Q8] The eexec'd code reads in cleartext: /currentdistillerparams where { pop /pdfmark where { pop (This PostScript file was created from an encrypted PDF file.) print (Redistilling encrypted PDF is not permitted.) print userdict /quit get exec }if} if currentfile closefile That means, if either your printer knows about currentdistillerparams and pdfmark or the PostScript job itself defines these operators (even as dummies, see note below), this code assumes you are going to re-distill the PS job which is forbidden. NOTE: The PostScript driver you use might insert statements like /currentdistillerparams where {pop} {userdict/currentdistillerparams{1 dict}put}ifelse /pdfmark where {pop} {userdict/pdfmark{cleartomark}put}ifelse or the like (see the recommendations in Adobe's Pdfmark Reference Manual).Helge Blischke (H.Blischke@acm.org) [A17] Sometimes GETs are truncated for web pages (including PDFs), why is this? [Q9] See http://www.networkice.com/Advice/Intrusions/2000608/default.htm for a secuity discussion on GET Data Overflow, which might explain why MSIE-transmitted URL-encoded strings from PDF "submit" are sometimes truncated at something a bit less than 4KB length.Bill Segraves (wsegrave@mindspring.com) [A18] Is PDF like Postscript? What I'm trying to get an idea of is whether all those PDFLib function calls that are generating parts of the file are doing massive amounts of processing or are they just doing simple things like writing PS-like markup tags wrapped around data. PDF is conceptually similar to PostScript. It isn't hugely complex to generate, but there is an additional (small) overhead of not only generating the graphical information, but also generating a file structure and index. In general, the time taken to make PostScript and PDF directly should be comparable. I wouldn't describe either of them as at all like HTML, but in the sense that you aren't rendering to a bitmap or anything like that, they are similar. [Q10] This is very true. There are also the aspects of compression of data within the PDF to be considered as well... These can be quite processor intensive. PDF is also pretty thingie about the format that bitmaps take, and it take take a fair bit of memory and time to convert the bitmaps to the right format. The operations aren't slow, it's more the fact that there can be millions of them. I would say that the similarity ends when you say that both formats (HTML and PDF) have structure. PDFs are pretty funky in their object layouts. I am not sure about the timing statement comparing PS and PDF though. I have generated large PS files (containing images), which have been quite slow, but the PDF has been much faster because of better compression support. I would think the best route with your ISP is to just do some trials and logging and see what happens. Also, I don't think pdflib does linearisation, which might cause problems with large documents online.Michael Still (mikal@stillhq.com) [A19] I would like to create a link to an external document with a remote go-to action. However using a URL file specification (chapter 3.10.4 of the PDF Reference) does not work. This is the created object in the pdf file: 1 0 obj << /Type /Annot /Subtype /Link /A << /S /GoToR /F << /Type /Filespec /FS /URL /F (http://www.tug.org/applications/pdftex/calculat.pdf) >> /NewWindow true >> /Rect [124.802 706.129 266.534 791.168] >> endobj [Q12] It's clear from experiments that Acrobat does not support the full generality of what might theoretically be possible. If you create something Acrobat wouldn't do, then you may be stuck, especially with indirect file references, which tend to work only if Acrobat would expect them there. An Acrobat weblink would have an /A field more like /A << /S /URI /URI (http:...) >> Aandi Inston (quite@dial.pipex.com) [A21] I'm trying to draw a pie slice, given the pie's center and the start and end angles. As far as I can tell, I need to use bezier curves to do the arc. Is there is an easier way, or if not, what do you use for the bezier's control points? [Q15] You can calculate them like: $alpha = ($alpha * 3.1415 / 180); $beta = ($beta * 3.1415 / 180); my $bcp = (4.0/3 * (1 - cos(($beta - $alpha)/2)) / sin(($beta - $alpha)/2)); my $sin_alpha = sin($alpha); my $sin_beta = sin($beta); my $cos_alpha = cos($alpha); my $cos_beta = cos($beta); my $p0_x = $x + $a * $cos_alpha; my $p0_y = $y + $b * $sin_alpha; my $p1_x = $x + $a * ($cos_alpha - $bcp * $sin_alpha); my $p1_y = $y + $b * ($sin_alpha + $bcp * $cos_alpha); my $p2_x = $x + $a * ($cos_beta + $bcp * $sin_beta); my $p2_y = $y + $b * ($sin_beta - $bcp * $cos_beta); my $p3_x = $x + $a * $cos_beta; my $p3_y = $y + $b * $sin_beta; $x,$y ... center point of arc $alpha,$beta ... start/end angle of arc $a,$b ... x/y extens of fitting elipsis (for circle $a=$b) $p0_x,$p0_y ... start-point of bezier $p1_x,$p1_y ... control-point 1 of bezier $p2_x,$p2_y ... control-point 2 of bezier $p3_x,$p3_y ... end-point of bezier Mind that you cannot calculate correct arcs for abs($beta-$alpha)>180 using this bezier approximation, so if your arcs span more than 180 degrees split it into two using a middle angle. (alfredreibenschuh@yahoo.com) [A25] The version 1.4 PDF specification allows JBIG2 compression to be used in PDF files. Has anybody been able to get Acrobat 5.0 create a PDF file that contains JBIG2-compressed images? [Q16] I don't think it will. I couldn't do it programmatically. There is certainly nothing in the user interface. The support may be read-only at the moment (and I have no way to confirm even that). It may be that Adobe have done something unusually sensible with regard to changes: add support for reading the files, then wait another year before making anyone. This could make the transition a lot smoother.Aandi Inston (quite@dial.pipex.com) [A26] I'm trying to draw rotated text, given the point where the text starts, and an angle of rotation (e.g., 90 degrees). So far, the text does not show up, so I guess my transformation matrix is incorrect, or maybe it's something else. If you know how to do this, could you show an example? To be more specific, what I'm trying to do is rotate text 90 degrees without "changing" the page's coordinate system. In essence, with x,y being a point in the page's "normal" coordinate system, the text is to start at x,y, except be rotated 90 degrees. What I tried was 0 1 -1 0 0 0 Tm [Q17] The text matrix is the way to move text. The best approach in debugging the matrix is to do the mathematics yourself. Since the text starts at 0,0 in user space, calculate the transformation of 0,0 with your matrix and see where it is. (This assumes that cm has not also been used).Aandi Inston (quite@dial.pipex.com) [A27] OK, what you want to do is save the graphic state ("q") then do the rotation, then restore the old state ("Q"). The rotation itself is also a bit more complex than what you have. For a single line of text it will be 0 1 -1 0 h 0, where "h" is the height of the text. Think about rotating a rectangle about the origin and you can see where the "h" comes from.Arne (arnet@hpcvplnx.cv.hp.com) [A28] I am a fairly competent PostScript programmer but now need to generate some PDF. I have the basic tree structure down, but I need to accurately position some text, to be specific I need to center some text. In PostScript it is easy to figure out the size of the string to be set then translate appropriately. This seems impossible in PDF, so how do you estimate the font metrics programmatically to set the text. To make it more difficult I am generating pDF from a Java Applet so small code size is a definite factor. [Q18] You need to include a table of font metrics in the code - so you can calculate the width and height, and then use those to translate ( just like postscript ). Adobe provides the data for the builtin fonts, otherwise you are on your own.Dave Bloodgood (dabldgd@home.com) [A29] I'm new to PDF's and am wondering how I might go about programatically enumerating all embedded images in a PDF, extracting them, then inserting a modified version back into the PDF? Basically I am looking to create a Windows program that will make a small change to all images in a PDF but otherwise leave the PDF alone. Are there decent PDF SDK's out there that will let me programatically manipulate a PDF? [Q19] The Acrobat SDK includes the Core API. This can be used to write plug-ins in C or C++. Provided that you don't need to run the result on a server this may be suitable. The Acrobat SDK mostly requires a full copy of Acrobat installed and licensed per machine. Acrobat SDK: http://partners.adobe.com/ You may find the PDFEdit layer does what you want, though you might be surprised at the learning curve, the amount of coding required, and how much you have to understand PDF internal formats. Indeed, you should start this task by reading the 600 page PDF Specification.Aandi Inston (quite@dial.pipex.com) [A30] Is it possible to extract an embedded image, modify it and put it back without creating a whole new PDF? [Q20] It depends what you mean. The SDK could edit a PDF file and save it. The changes would be added to the end of the file - so you are storing both the original and the new image. The SDK can also do a Save As, rewriting the file.Aandi Inston (quite@dial.pipex.com) [A31] Most information inside a PDF document is stored in a data structure known as an object. These objects have two major identifiers, and object number, and a generation number. It is therefore possible to create a new version of an object without having to recreate the entire PDF structure -- you simply increment the generation number. Then again, you still need to update the xref table and other areas of the document to refer to the new version of the object. Hence, it probably is faster just to recreate the entire file programatically.Michael Still (mikal@stillhq.com) [A32] Is there a possibility to easiliy embed WMF in a PDF file while creating the PDF using a PDF library? Normally the libs only support JPG, PNG and TIFF. [Q21] Easily? No. WMF is a Windows-specific format, containing graphical concepts with no easy or direct equivalent in PDF. If you are on Windows you can play the metafile to get the graphical constructs, and try to convert them to PDF equivalents. But on other platforms this is a huge development - probably larger than all of the rest of PDFLib.Aandi Inston (quite@dial.pipex.com) [A33] The WMF file format is discussed in the "Graphics File Format FAQ", which can be found at http://www.faqs.org/faqs/graphics/fileformats-faq/part3/ -- this includes a link to the specification and some discussion. This should give you enough information to be able to implement changes to the PDF library of your choice (assuming you have the source code).Michael Still (mikal@stillhq.com) [A34] There is a library to support the WMF file format at: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=10501Michael Still (mikal@stillhq.com) [A35] This is not helped by the fact that the file format is not fully documented by Microsoft. Only the header format has documentation; the contents are basically renderings of GDI calls, and the documentation for them only comes with MS-platform compilers. To the original poster (and those saying 'me too!'): If you are a reasonable programmer, you might well find it useful to look at wmflib2 at http://www.wvware.com/libwmf.html As well as documenting those parts of the WMF file format that have been successfully reverse-engineered, there is software to convert WMF to other formats such as fig which you might find more tractable. Aandi's comment that WMF contains graphical concepts with no easy or direct equivalent in PDF is true, but you may also find that _many_ of the most commonly-used primitives in WMF have pretty direct analogues in PDF, postscript and many other drawing languages. So no, it isn't easy. But neither is it impossibly difficult. It's somewhere in-between. YMMV.Kevin Ashley (K.Ashley@ulcc.ac.uk) [A36] I have a problem concerning special Polish characters which I write down as Unicode characters but which don't show up correctly in a PDF document when using the Helvetica standard Pdf font. The problem scenario is the following: I have implemented a PDF Report Generator in Java. To describe it briefly, the generator is a piece of Java code that reads an XML layout specification and a stream of Java business objects and generates a Pdf document from it. For the PDF low- level stuff, I am relying on using Bruno Lowagie's Java library `iText', version 0.37. Generally, only Pdf standard fonts are used. [Q22] I think that's the problem right there. PDF standard fonts include only ISOLatin1Encoding. That indeed doesn't include Polish characters. Helvetica does NOT include "Z with a dot accent". Standard fonts are 1-byte, not Unicode. Generating a PDF with Unicode characters is possible, but the program to do it has to be written COMPLETELY differently and is generally an order of magnitude more complex. Check if iText offers this option. Another possibility, again if iText offers it, is to use a non-Unicode font containing Polish characters, and embed it in the PDF.Aandi Inston (quite@dial.pipex.com) [A37] Yes, you can change the font-encoding so you can use the regular codepage with the embedded font, or with the base 14 fonts, or with Type 1 fonts with definitions for the glyph names, or the WGL Truetype fonts with the glyphs implemented for the codepage. Thus, depending on what codepage it is, then there are font-encodings for that codepage in the PDF so that the unchanged text character data is used with the fonts. Converting it to Unicode would be the step if the PDFs were ever used to be sources of Unicode PDF data in readers that were unaware how to reorder the glyphs in the glyph map from a non-standard encoding of a font in the PDF to Unicode, or to some other codepage. That is to say, software meant to search through them would have to understand the glyph mappings to the character values outside the regular printable ASCII characters. Where the string elements' data like the glyphs can be in the native codepage, the elements in the navigational interface for the PDF reader applications require the PDFDocEncoding or UnicodeEncoding, those are predefined encodings. For example, C code to write a font encoding differences from the predefined WinAnsiEncoding for codepage 1250 is as this: "extern long writePDFFontEncodingDifferencesCentralEurope(FILE* fd){ //CP1250 long written=0; written+=fwrite("128 /Euro ", 1, 10, fd); written+=fwrite("140 /Sacute /Tcaron /Zcaron /Zacute ", 1, 36, fd); written+=fwrite("156 /sacute /tcaron /zcaron /zacute ", 1, 37, fd); written+=fwrite("161 /caron /breve /Lslash ", 1, 26, fd); written+=fwrite("165 /Aogonek ", 1, 13, fd); written+=fwrite("170 /Scedilla ", 1, 14, fd); written+=fwrite(" 175 /Zdotaccent ", 1, 17, fd); written+=fwrite("178 /ogonek /lslash ", 1, 20, fd); written+=fwrite("185 /aogonek /scedilla ", 1, 23, fd); written+=fwrite("188 /Lcaron /hungarumlaut /lcaron /zdotaccent /Racute ", 1, 55, fd); written+=fwrite("195 /Abreve ", 1, 12, fd); written+=fwrite("197 /Lacute /Cacute ", 1, 20, fd); written+=fwrite("200 /Ccaron ", 1, 12, fd); written+=fwrite("202 /Eogonek ", 1, 13, fd); written+=fwrite(" 204 /Ecaron ", 1, 13, fd); written+=fwrite("207 /Dcaron /Dslash ", 1, 20, fd); written+=fwrite("209 /Nacute /Ncaron /Ohungarumlaut ", 1, 15, fd); written+=fwrite("216 /Rcaron /Uring ", 1, 19, fd); written+=fwrite("219 /Uhungarumlaut ", 1, 19, fd); written+=fwrite(" 222 /Tcedilla ", 1, 15, fd); written+=fwrite("224 /racute ", 1, 12, fd); written+=fwrite("227 /abreve ", 1, 12, fd); written+=fwrite("229 /lacute /cacute /ccedilla /ccaron ", 1, 39, fd); written+=fwrite("234 /eogonek ", 1, 13, fd); written+=fwrite("236 /ecaron ", 1, 12, fd); written+=fwrite("239 /dcaron /dstroke ", 1, 21, fd); written+=fwrite("241 /nacute /ncaron ", 1, 20, fd); written+=fwrite("245 /ohungarumlaut ", 1, 20, fd); written+=fwrite("248 /rcaron /uring ", 1, 19, fd); written+=fwrite("251 /uhungarumlaut ", 1, 19, fd); written+=fwrite("254 /tcedilla /dotaccent ", 1, 25, fd); return(written); } Your data might be in a different codepage, on UNIX systems probably one of the ISO 8859 codepages or ASCII codepages, on Windows the Windows codepages, and on Macintosh the Mac codepages. The PDF has the predefined encodings for those types of codepages, basically, then writing the font encoding differences remaps the characters back to their glyphs in the font in the native codepage. That way, you can use the extended Western glyphs in the base 14 fonts. The extended CJK fonts are using the composite Type 0 fonts. For example, the Big 5 and JIS encodings are for much of Chinese or Japanese, respectively, where their non-Western characters are not in the Western codepages. Basically that is the difference between a single byte codepage which has enough characters for almost all of the glyphs of a Western script, and the multiple byte codepages to support more than 256 glyphs. The single byte codepages are mostly having around 220 glyphs, in the codepages, not of their script. Overall, it is probably best to convert it to Unicode, what is required then is the knowledge of the Unicode fonts. The Unicode fonts can be very large, for example a single Unicode font has tens of thousands of characters in it, where a regular font file has less than a thousand. So, feasibly, it might be better to write the font encoding differences into the PDF generated from the Java. In a different case, it might be more feasible to convert the data to Unicode and then embed a subset of the font into the PDF, where it would only have as many characters as are glyphs in the data, which is for Western languages probably less than a hundred, not the complete font. So, for Western languages and single-byte codepages, the most direct way to put the text data into a PDF is using the base 14 fonts with the font encoding differences. This is very convenient, for example, to have the Euro glyph without Unicode, with the font encoding different to map it to 128, and to remap Zcaron and zcaron to 142 and 158, where those are names of the glyphs that are used in the font encoding. The names of the glyphs are in the Adobe PostScript glyph lists, and there are representations for each of those I think in Unicode. Information about this is from Unicode and Adobe. Then, there are the strings that have to be the predefined PDFDocEncoding or UnicodeEncoding, those as part of navigational elements.Ross Finlayson (apex@calpha.com) [A38] I've been looking at the PDF file in a text editor and found a number of /Subtype /Image objects. Are these raster or vector images? [Q23] These are raster images, but all the vector images are held in the page stream, as are text and some bitmap images, and you won't be able easily to see what they are.Aandi Inston (quite@dial.pipex.com) [A39] You are on the right track. Vector "images" are not images, but consist of PDF (Postscript) drawing commands. In an uncompressed PDF you can recognise them easily. In a compressed PDF I do not know of a way to tell text sections from vector sections, as they both consist of PS drawing commands. Maybe someone else knows more.Arne (arnet@hpcvplnx.cv.hp.com) [A40] Can anyone verify which of these tables are required when embedding a true type font? I've got 3 sources that say 3 different things. OS/2 cmap cvt fpgm glyf head hhea hmtx loca maxp name post prep [Q79] Depends on what you means by embedding. You need to include these tables in your embedded file String[] tables = { "head", "hhea", "loca", "maxp", "cvt ", "prep", "glyf", "hmtx", "fpgm", "cmap" }; but you need to read some of the others (such as OS/2) to get values you need during the embedding process.John Farrow (jfarrow@visualprogramxming.co.nz) [A133] cvt, fpgm, and prep are definitely not required by Acrobat, although the PDF reference may specify otherwise.Thomas Merz (tm@pdflib.com) [A134] Has anybody out there:- added there own custom Info Dictionary fields? does Acrobat Readers "doc info" command show them? does Exchange etc interfeer with them? I noticed that that the spec recomends adding your own custom fields to the "catalogue" object. But I intend adding them to the Info Dictionary in the hope that Verity will index them. [Q134] You may add any key value pairs to the DOCINFO dictionary, and Verity will index them (if properly configured). But Acrobat (reader) only shows the predefined ones.H.Blischke@srz-berlin.de (Helge Blischke) [A205] What is the correct algorithm for converting between colour spaces? [Q137] The problem is that GhostScript uses Adobe's documented method of converting CMYK to RGB. In this, for instance, 100% magenta + 100% yellow simply becomes 100% red. This is optically correct, but not a good approximation of a printer, and not what Acrobat does. Adding colour management, perhaps to match a profile, and ideally using embedded source profiles from the PDF, would not be a simple undertaking. It may be worth posting a new topic specifically asking about Color management of CMYK conversion in GhostScript to see this question reach the largest number of people. I know you're not the first to be interested in this area.Aandi Inston (quite@dial.pipex.com) [A211] I want to create WWW links in my PDF documents. The URL will start a JAVA request servlet on my webserver, and the result may be more than one document. Is it possible to create a list menu behind the hotspots, which displays the documents in a list so that the reader can select which he/she wants to open? [Q138] I have been playing with Named Destinations and the popupmenu method in PDF javascript. Perhaps this javascript will lead you to a solution. Here I had set up some named destinations based upon a variable name appended to a standard set of suffixes. Grab the name of the hotspot and use it to build a destination name. Use popupmenu to have the user select the suffix they want ( in this case it's always "removal"). Call gotoNamedDest to go there var itemname = event.target.name; var xreply var reply = app.popUpMenu( [ itemname+"removal", "Removal", "Installation", "Operation", "Part Info", "Loc on Dwg", "Loc on Schematic", "Detail Dwg or Picture"] ); if (reply!= null) { switch ( reply ) { case "Removal": xreply = "removal"; break; case "Installation": xreply = "removal"; break; case "Operation": xreply = "removal"; break; case "Part Info": xreply = "removal"; break; case "Loc on Dwg": xreply = "removal"; break; case "Loc on Schematic": xreply = "removal"; break; case "Detail Dwg or Picture": xreply = "removal"; break; } var args = new String(); args = itemname+xreply; this.gotoNamedDest(args ); John Freund (jfreund@freundassociates.com) [A212] Does anybody has information about using german umlauts and other european special characters in pdf documents? [Q144] I think that using fonts with WinAnsiEncoding will solve your problem. It seems to correspond to the ISO Latin 1 character set (could somebody please confirm this?). So you can use accented characters directly in PDF text commands. I'm using them for Portuguese words. For example: 6 0 obj << /Type /Font /Subtype /Type1 /Encoding /WinAnsiEncoding /BaseFont /Helvetica >> endobj 8 0 obj << /Type /Font /Subtype /Type1 /Encoding /WinAnsiEncoding /BaseFont /Helvetica-Bold >> endobj 10 0 obj <</Length 11 0 R>> stream 0 g BT 1.0204 0 0 1.0237 368.5677 641.0251 Tm /HB 4.081 Tf % set Helvetica-Bold font (CLASSIFICAÇÃO)Tj ET BT 181.548 703.3136 TD (Freqüência)Tj ET endstream endobj Jose Fernando Tepedino (jose@wiser.com.br) [A224] I'm writing a program that has pdf as output format. now I need to display a text in cyrillic letters. i have no idea how to do that. Please, can you help me or at least point me to some documentation. [Q154] It's all in the pdf reference document that I assume you already have. The main problem you have is that the built in fonts in Acrobat don't cover cyrillic so, you'll have to embedd an external font or at least refer to it. If you are not yet discouraged I must tell you that you'll also have to peek at the font to get the character widths, which is rather easy with an type1 afm file and not so easy with a true type file. Here's a couple of dictionaries created with iText for a cyrillic true type font without embedding: 6 0 obj << /Ascent 728 /Flags 32 /StemV 80 /ItalicAngle 0 /Type /FontDescriptor /FontName /ArialMT /CapHeight 699 /FontBBox [-222 -324 1071 1037] /Descent -210 >> endobj 3 0 obj << /FirstChar 32 /BaseFont /ArialMT /FontDescriptor 6 0 R /Encoding << /Differences [32 /space /exclam /quotedbl /numbersign /dollar /percent /ampersand /quotesingle /parenleft /parenright /asterisk /plus /comma /hyphen /period /slash /zero /one /two /three /four /five /six /seven /eight /nine /colon /semicolon /less /equal /greater /question /at /A /B /C /D /E /F /G /H /I /J /K /L /M /N /O /P /Q /R /S /T /U /V /W /X /Y /Z /bracketleft /backslash /bracketright /asciicircum /underscore /grave /a /b /c /d /e /f /g /h /i /j /k /l /m /n /o /p /q /r /s /t /u /v /w /x /y /z /braceleft /bar /braceright /asciitilde /.notdef /afii10051 /afii10052 /quotesinglbase /afii10100 /quotedblbase /ellipsis /dagger /daggerdbl /Euro /perthousand /afii10058 /guilsinglleft /afii10059 /afii10061 /afii10060 /afii10145 /afii10099 /quoteleft /quoteright /quotedblleft /quotedblright /bullet /endash /emdash /.notdef /trademark /afii10106 /guilsinglright /afii10107 /afii10109 /afii10108 /afii10193 /space /afii10062 /afii10110 /afii10057 /currency /afii10050 /brokenbar /section /afii10023 /copyright /afii10053 /guillemotleft /logicalnot /hyphen /registered /afii10056 /degree /plusminus /afii10055 /afii10103 /afii10098 /mu /paragraph /periodcentered /afii10071 /afii61352 /afii10101 /guillemotright /afii10105 /afii10054 /afii10102 /afii10104 /afii10017 /afii10018 /afii10019 /afii10020 /afii10021 /afii10022 /afii10024 /afii10025 /afii10026 /afii10027 /afii10028 /afii10029 /afii10030 /afii10031 /afii10032 /afii10033 /afii10034 /afii10035 /afii10036 /afii10037 /afii10038 /afii10039 /afii10040 /afii10041 /afii10042 /afii10043 /afii10044 /afii10045 /afii10046 /afii10047 /afii10048 /afii10049 /afii10065 /afii10066 /afii10067 /afii10068 /afii10069 /afii10070 /afii10072 /afii10073 /afii10074 /afii10075 /afii10076 /afii10077 /afii10078 /afii10079 /afii10080 /afii10081 /afii10082 /afii10083 /afii10084 /afii10085 /afii10086 /afii10087 /afii10088 /afii10089 /afii10090 /afii10091 /afii10092 /afii10093 /afii10094 /afii10095 /afii10096 /afii10097] /Type /Encoding >> /LastChar 255 /Subtype /TrueType /Widths [277 277 354 556 556 889 666 190 333 333 389 583 277 333 277 277 556 556 556 556 556 556 556 556 556 556 277 277 583 583 583 556 1015 666 666 722 722 666 610 777 722 277 500 666 556 833 722 777 666 777 722 666 610 722 666 943 666 666 610 277 277 277 469 556 333 556 556 500 556 556 277 556 556 222 222 500 222 833 556 556 556 556 333 500 277 556 500 722 500 500 500 333 259 333 583 0 864 541 222 364 333 1000 556 556 556 1000 1057 333 1010 582 854 718 556 222 222 333 333 350 556 1000 0 1000 906 333 812 437 556 552 277 635 500 500 556 488 259 556 667 736 718 556 583 333 736 277 399 548 277 222 411 576 537 277 556 1072 510 556 222 666 500 277 666 656 666 541 677 666 923 604 718 718 582 656 833 722 777 718 666 722 610 635 760 666 739 666 916 937 791 885 656 718 1010 722 556 572 531 364 583 556 668 458 558 558 437 583 687 552 556 541 556 500 458 500 822 500 572 520 802 822 625 718 520 510 750 541] /Type /Font >> endobj Paulo Soares (psoares@ip.pt) [A237] Can I get the wrapper code that builds a PKCS#7 object from the Raw Signature format? [Q160] It's buried at the Adobe site at http://support.adobe.com/devsup/devsup.nsf/docs/50752.htmThomas Merz (tm@pdflib.com) [A245] I have a general question in regard to OLE automation. I've built an application that controls Acrobat, and I'm trying to make it more robust. The problem I'm having is what to do when I try to open a non-existent file (a fdf pointing to a missing pdf file). Acrobat then displays a dialog box, and waits for user input. Since there's no user to click on the cancel or ok button, my program freezes waiting for Acrobat to respond. Is there any way to pass a "cancel" or something similar to Acrobat via OLE automation? [Q30] You can get the name of the pdf file that the fdf points to using the FDFGetFile method from the Acrobat forms toolkit. Then use code to verify that the pdf exists (and display a suitable message if it doesn't) before trying to open it via the pdf.Dan Sideen (dansideen@home.com) [A56] I want to access the Acrobat Reader with DDE by using VB. The DDE-commands are described in http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/acrosdk/docs/iac/IACReference.pdf I am searching for a working example. [Q155] It took me a long time to get this to work, but it does, at least with Acrobat 4. Sub Printit(FileToPrint As String) 'Print a file using Acrobat Dim sCmd As String Dim FullName As String 'defined as string elsewhere FullName = FormsHome + "" + FileToPrint sCmd = "[FilePrintSilent(" & FullName & ")]" frmViewForm.lblDDE.Caption = "Printing..." & FileToPrint frmViewForm.lblDDE.LinkTopic = "Acroview|Control" frmViewForm.lblDDE.LinkItem = "" If frmViewForm.lblDDE.LinkMode <> 2 Then frmViewForm.lblDDE.LinkMode = 2 End If frmViewForm.lblDDE.LinkTimeout = 1000 frmViewForm.lblDDE.LinkExecute sCmd frmViewForm.lblDDE.LinkMode = 0 frmViewForm.lblDDE.Caption = "" frmViewForm.lblDDE.LinkMode = 2 End Sub Dan Sideen (dansideen@home.com) [A238] I have created a PDF file and get the following error when trying to view the file in Acrobat Reader 4.0: "The file is damaged but is being repaired." No other information is given. The file then opens and I can view the document. The file has not been zipped or e-mailed. As a test, I created a PDF example from the Adobe Portable Document Format Manual Version 1.3 and I received the same error. In both cases, the result is messed up. Is there a way to either truly fix such a file, or at least "extract" the good parts? [Q13] This normally means you have the offsets in the XREF table wrong, so they are regenerated. Make sure you are using an editor that will show you binary content, and remember to count each newline as two bytes if you are running on Windows.Michael Still (mikal@stillhq.com) [A22] When I see this message it means "something is wrong" and it could be just about anything. The first thing to think of is: remember that PDF is indexed with exacty byte offsets -- so be sure you are using the right sort of line ending and counting all the bytes correctly.Aaron Watters (aaron@at.reportlab.dot.com) [A23] We want to use Distiller Server to create PDF versions of customer annual statements. These will then be made available to the customer over the internet. Is this a violation of the Distiller Server license agreement? I would normally have said not, but the FAQ says "Using Distiller Server, can I create an Adobe PDF file from one of my company's internal documents and publish it on the internet for someone outside my company? For example, if a customer requests a bank statement over the Internet, can I publish it in Adobe PDF?. No....[snip]" This sounds exactly like what we are doing, except that the document is not generated at the customer's request, but periodically. Also, it seems to be saying that no company documents can _ever_ be published on the internet, which can't be right!! Any advice or clarification? [Q39] Tricky, it depends I believe on whether the customer will request these statements, or you will simply publish them anyway. The first is a violation, the second is (I think) not. It certainly appears that you can read it that way. This would certainly restrict the usefulness of the format. I *thought* the idea of the licence was to prevent you making a 'distillation service' available, whereby people could send you files and have them converted and sent back. Creating your own documents in PDF form would certainly seem reasonable, and if you used the standard Distiller, and paid someone to sit and convert the files, this would certainly be permitted under that licence. I think you may have to seek a legal opinion, or better, a clarification from Adobe. If you get one, I'd be interested in hearing it.Ken Sharp (ken@spamcop.net) [A65] Should I be able to get the jpeg to appear in color in my pdf doc created through Distiller 3.01? [Q40] Sure, use a colour driver.Aandi Inston (quite@dial.pipex.com) [A66] Yes. Do not use the HP driver, but the one Acrobat installed in your system: Acrobat Distiller 3.01. Using a black and white driver makes your images black and white.Matti Vuori (mvuori@koti.soon.fi) [A67] Why is it the whenever I create a pdf file from Word I get a page size of 8x11? I have changed the paper size in the advanced properties of the Distiller printer driver to Postscript Custom Page size and specified the new size but it makes no difference. It doesn't matter whether I print to file and then use Distiller or use the Create Adobe PDF button in Word and Use Distiller that way. [Q41] I had encountered the same problem and thought it was only on a German Windows2000/NT4 platform, since it didn't occurred on an English version that was at my disposal. May be the solution works for you as well. If you have a user defined format in Word and converting it to pdf via Acrobat Destiller does not output your format, try the following (only Win2000 or NT4): In the printer dialog (- start - settings - printers) in the uppermost menu-list you'll find the "file" menu. In the file menu you'll find the entry "server properties". In the "server properties" you can add a new format (like A4 or US-Letter). Name it "myformat" (or what ever you like). Fill in the your paper size (in the lower part of the dialog). Press the "save format" button. Now every printer that is listed in the printer-dialog-window has the "myformat"-format. Switch to Word. Look in the - file - "set up paper" (or whatever it's called in the English Word) dialog. The "myformat"-format should be displayed instead of "custompapersize". The new format is only local on your workstation (independent from your computer being connected to your LAN). If you want to convert doc to pdf on another machine, you must first add your self-defined paper size to the printer server properties as described above. No convert your Word document to pdf via the destiller. It should work correctly now.Andreas Wall (Andreas.Wall@shinkatech.com) [A68] Is there a possibility to automatically generate PDF files with Acrobat Distiller without typing in the name for the output file? I heard that in Acrobat 3 patching some INI files works fine, but is there any chance to do the same in Acrobat 4? [Q42] With a watched folder you can create automatically a pdf with the same name as the original postscript file.Veli Holopainen (veli.holopainen@kaleva.fi) [A69] What is the best colour printer driver for rendering graphics to a pdf file? I have one graphic that renders very badly using hp5/6ps. [Q143] The AdobePS driver (free download from Adobe, of course) works well. Set up your Distiller printer to default to that driver.Dick Margulis (margulis@fiam.net) [A220]