upside-down form elements?

upside-down form elements?

[Matthew Baker]

Someone was asking me about forms and PDF the other day so I downloaded
the Up-To-Date on forms.  Everything works beautifully except that when I
print, all my form elements are upside down!  That is to say, each letter
is flipped along the x-axis but is correctly positioned inside the form
frame. The same seems to be tru of image (but it's kind of hard to tell
because my images are symmetrical).  Anyone seen this problem before?  I
have option=printable in the setupfield commands (without which I get
nothing printed)..

Cheers,
Matthew

--
Dr. Matthew Baker           matthew.baker@gmd.de
GMD - FIT.MMK               http://fit.gmd.de/hci/pages/matthew.baker.html

Re: upside-down form elements?

[Hans Hagen]

Matthew Baker wrote:

> Someone was asking me about forms and PDF the other day so I downloaded
> the Up-To-Date on forms.  Everything works beautifully except that when I
> print, all my form elements are upside down!  That is to say, each letter

Can you also test the travel form? 

> is flipped along the x-axis but is correctly positioned inside the form
> frame. The same seems to be tru of image (but it's kind of hard to tell
> because my images are symmetrical).  Anyone seen this problem before?  I
> have option=printable in the setupfield commands (without which I get
> nothing printed)..

I encountered this problem with a form I made for Han The Thanh, but was
not able to trace it. Acro 4 is more troublesome than Acro 3. I reported
this bug several times to adobe, but it seems they didn't repair it. 

The interesting thing is that I do not do anything special, just normal
xforms and fields. Rather strange eh? 

Hans

-----------------------------------------------------------------
                                          Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE
              Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands
      tel: 038 477 53 69 | fax: 038 477 53 74 | www.pragma-ade.nl
-----------------------------------------------------------------

Re: upside-down form elements?

[Matthew Baker]

On Tue, 1 Jun 1999, Hans Hagen wrote:

> Can you also test the travel form? 

Same problem

> I encountered this problem with a form I made for Han The Thanh, but was
> not able to trace it. Acro 4 is more troublesome than Acro 3. I reported
> this bug several times to adobe, but it seems they didn't repair it. 

I've been looking at the Postscript output.  Just before teach of my form
elements there something like

1 0 0 -1 162.73999 710.22999 cm

and this is causing the problem.    The -1 should be 1.  However this
places the test above the box in which it is supposed to appear, ie
Acrobat's PS converter seems to have intelligently been able to reposition
the upside-down text.  

> The interesting thing is that I do not do anything special, just normal
> xforms and fields. Rather strange eh? 

I have no doubt in my mind that this is an Acrobat bug, given that a) it
looks fine in PDF and b) every version of reader I try seems to do
something different (either printing upside-down text, not printing
anything or plain not letting me type into the fields!).  The question is,
is it a bug that can be worked around?

I haven't tried this in windows yet.  Will try to today (Windows machines
here are much scarcer than Unix boxes).

- Matt

--
Dr. Matthew Baker           matthew.baker@gmd.de
GMD - FIT.MMK               http://fit.gmd.de/hci/pages/matthew.baker.html

Re: upside-down form elements?

[Hans Hagen]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2953 bytes --]

Matthew Baker wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 1 Jun 1999, Hans Hagen wrote:
> 
> > Can you also test the travel form?
> 
> Same problem
> 
> > I encountered this problem with a form I made for Han The Thanh, but was
> > not able to trace it. Acro 4 is more troublesome than Acro 3. I reported
> > this bug several times to adobe, but it seems they didn't repair it.
> 
> I've been looking at the Postscript output.  Just before teach of my form
> elements there something like
> 
> 1 0 0 -1 162.73999 710.22999 cm
> 
> and this is causing the problem.    The -1 should be 1.  However this
> places the test above the box in which it is supposed to appear, ie
> Acrobat's PS converter seems to have intelligently been able to reposition
> the upside-down text.
> 
> > The interesting thing is that I do not do anything special, just normal
> > xforms and fields. Rather strange eh?
> 
> I have no doubt in my mind that this is an Acrobat bug, given that a) it
> looks fine in PDF and b) every version of reader I try seems to do
> something different (either printing upside-down text, not printing
> anything or plain not letting me type into the fields!).  The question is,
> is it a bug that can be worked around?
> 
> I haven't tried this in windows yet.  Will try to today (Windows machines
> here are much scarcer than Unix boxes).

The - sign is a cue. PDFTEX somehow has a opposite reference frame when
annotations (the pure ones) are concerned than for instance pdfmarks. I
have to feed the \pdfannot primitive with a negative value to compensate
for this. I would say, as long as the type is ok, the viewers should do
their job too.   

As said, I have encountered problems like yours before (it's one
bottleneck in some forms experiments with thanh) but indeed every viewer
acts different. 

I did some experiments, and found out that some box raising combined
with positive values solves the problem. 

Now, the strange thing is that this only affects the box being drawn,
there are (low level pdftex generated) x/y shifts involved, but no
rotation and scaling! So, actually this is a bug in the readers. By the
way, I did report the print problems to the beta program, I also
suggested them to reset the cm matrix at the start of each annotation,
but alas, problem not solved. 

I've attached a file, and I want to make sure field 2 and 3 print ok
everywhere, so whoever want to test on whatever platform ... 

I'll send the 2 line patch and the test.tex file to thanh and matthew
for further testing. (Matthew: you should change the macros in the
spec-tpd.tex driver (run time loaded, so no fmt generation needed). 

Hans

-----------------------------------------------------------------
                                          Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE
              Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands
      tel: 038 477 53 69 | fax: 038 477 53 74 | www.pragma-ade.nl
-----------------------------------------------------------------

[-- Attachment #2: test.pdf --]
[-- Type: application/pdf, Size: 7500 bytes --]

Re: upside-down form elements?

[Matthew Baker]

On Wed, 2 Jun 1999, Hans Hagen wrote:

> I've attached a file, and I want to make sure field 2 and 3 print ok
> everywhere, so whoever want to test on whatever platform ... 

Tested on SGI Acroread 4.0 beta and Linux Acroread 3.02 and worked on
both.  I assume box 1 is supposed to be incorrect?  I can test on Win95
when I get home tonight, but I suppose there is no shortage on win95
testers :)

Actually, there was a problem with Acroread 3.0x Linux that I didn't
mention because other forms I have, which were not produced by Context,
resulted in the same problem.  This problem was that the form contents did
not display in PostScript file: they make it into the Postscript file but
for some reason are invisible.  Boxes 2 and 3 in test.pdf now appear
correct (so Context is doing better than the alternative packages in this
respect!)

> I'll send the 2 line patch and the test.tex file to thanh and matthew
> for further testing. (Matthew: you should change the macros in the
> spec-tpd.tex driver (run time loaded, so no fmt generation needed). 

Which macros would that be?

--
Dr. Matthew Baker           matthew.baker@gmd.de
GMD - FIT.MMK               http://fit.gmd.de/hci/pages/matthew.baker.html

Re: upside-down form elements?

[Hans Hagen]

Matthew Baker wrote:

> > I'll send the 2 line patch and the test.tex file to thanh and matthew
> > for further testing. (Matthew: you should change the macros in the
> > spec-tpd.tex driver (run time loaded, so no fmt generation needed).

The one before sample 3 in 'test.tex'. Just replace them in
spec-tpd.tex.

Hans

-----------------------------------------------------------------
                                          Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE
              Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands
      tel: 038 477 53 69 | fax: 038 477 53 74 | www.pragma-ade.nl
-----------------------------------------------------------------

Re: upside-down form elements?

[Taco Hoekwater]

>>>>> "Matthew" == Matthew Baker <mbaker@zeus.gmd.de> writes:

    Matthew> Someone was asking me about forms and PDF the other day
    Matthew> so I downloaded the Up-To-Date on forms.  Everything
    Matthew> works beautifully except that when I print, all my form
    Matthew> elements are upside down!  That is to say, each letter is
    Matthew> flipped along the x-axis but is correctly positioned
    Matthew> inside the form frame. The same seems to be tru of image
    Matthew> (but it's kind of hard to tell because my images are
    Matthew> symmetrical).  Anyone seen this problem before?  I have
    Matthew> option=printable in the setupfield commands (without
    Matthew> which I get nothing printed)..

Never heard of this one, but it's a nice special effect. Hans, could
you make this be an option in all versions? ;-)

Taco