[PDFBOX-283] Character encoding/appearance issues when filling forms

• Type: Bug
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Critical
• Resolution: Fixed
• Affects Version/s: 2.0.0
• Fix Version/s: 2.0.0
• Component/s: AcroForm
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Anonymous
• Created: 12/Jun/07 17:23
• Updated: 17/Mar/16 19:08
• Resolved: 12/Dec/14 22:10

Description

[imported from SourceForge]
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?group_id=78314&atid=552832&aid=1735902
Originally submitted by scop on 2007-06-12 10:23.

When filling a text field with non-ASCII characters such as in my surname "Skyttä" and saving the document in a UTF-8 environment, something goes wrong with the appearance of the text.

The value itself seems to be stored correctly, but when opening the doc, the appearance of "ä" is not that, but rather something which happens when UTF-8 is mistakenly treated as ISO-8859-1 (two garbage characters).

PDAppearance uses the platform default encoding in quite a few places which apparently has potential to mess things up. In particular, insertGeneratedAppearance() generates a PrintWriter from an OutputStream without specifying the encoding. In fact, if I hack that to use ISO-8859-1, the appearance of my "ä" case is correct, but that won't obviously work with anything else than chars that are valid ISO-8859-1.

In which char encoding should the value be written to the appearance stream (at end of insertGeneratedAppearance())?

Issue Links

• depends upon: PDFBOX-922 True type PDFont subclass only supports WinAnsiEncoding (hardcoded!)
• depends upon: PDFBOX-2333 Overhaul the appearance generation for PDF forms