Stefan Cameron on Forms
Building intelligent forms using Adobe LiveCycle Designer

Bug: Unable to Set Caption or Value Font Separately

Description

I was showing someone how to use Designer 7.0 today and came across a bug in the Font palette. I was trying to show them how to make the caption of a text field bold without making the value bold using the Bold (“B”) button on the Font palette however I could only change both the caption and value fonts together, not separately as one should be able to do using the selector control located at the top of the palette (which reads, “Currently editing Caption and Value…” by default).

Using the selector control, you should be able to set it to “Currently editing Caption properties…”, press the bold button and make only the caption font bold. Unfortunately, that’s not what happens. Instead, both fonts (or, the entire field) is changed to bold.

Rest assured, this bug was immediately fixed in Designer 7.1 — a highly-recommended upgrade because tables were introduced in that version, amongst other things.

Workaround

The good news is that there’s a simple workaround using script. All you need to do is use the Font palette to make sure that the Bold button isn’t activated (that the field isn’t bolded) and then set the following FormCalc script statements on field’s Initialize event using the Script Editor palette:

$.caption.font.typeface = "Myriad Pro"
$.caption.font.weight = "bold"
$.caption.font.size = "10pt"

Feel free to specify a different font name or point size if you like although I would recommend using the same font name and point size as you specified in the Font palette so that the result doesn’t differ too much from what you see on the canvas.

Finally, preview the form as PDF using the canvas’s PDF Preview tab. When the form is initialized (loaded) in Acrobat, the field’s caption font will be set to the type, weight and size you specified.

Fix

Please refer to the Bug List for updated information on the version(s) affected by this bug as well as if and when it was/will be fixed.

Posted by Stefan Cameron on November 3rd, 2006
Filed under Bugs,Designer
Both comments and pings are currently closed.

3 Responses to “Bug: Unable to Set Caption or Value Font Separately”

  1. Thomas on December 4th, 2006

    I also have other font related problems on Chinese characters.

    First, it cannot bold on Chinese font even if the bold button is activated or using the script in Initialize event.

    Second, incorrect Chinese font is used on A/R 7.0.0. The Chinese font defined in Designer is “Adobe Ming Std L”, however, it becomes “Kaiu” in A/R 7.0.0. I found it is fixed in A/R 7.0.8. However, some users’ PC A/R 7.0.0 prompt that their A/R has no update anymore even if select “Check Update”. They tell me that they are using the latest version of A/R.

    Third, if a text field or text label include both English and Chinese characters, it is corrupted on some Windows environment. One of the environment is English Windows 2000/XP/2003 with A/R 7.0.0 and Adobe Asian Language Pack.

    Moreover, the strokes of some common Chinese characters is different between “Adobe Ming Std L” and Windows embedded system MingLui font. Different strokes may has different meaning.

    Please discuss. Any workaround? Thanks.

  2. Henry on December 5th, 2006

    Hello, Thomas:

    The first issue about bold Chinese font is a known issue. What happens is Adobe Text Engine render text using exactly the specified font. It doesn’t do fake fonting. Technically, bold font or italic font is really a different font. For many western fonts, the font file contains those font variants. That means Arial font file contains normal Arial, bold Arial, italic Arial, etc… Clicking bold button actually applies bold Arial font. But for CJK (Chinese/Japanese/Korean) fonts, it is impossible to do that way because there are too many glyphs in the font file. Some text engine do fake fonting based on normal font glyph. We see many this kind of font decoration, like font shading, cross line, underline… Designer Team used to debate if bold/italic button should be disabled for CJK font. Technically, yes we can do. But we may have to pay some performance cost. And there is no good way to get around this if you use script. Some people have 1500 font installed on the machine. Digging to each font file to find the detail is very expensive. The end result is bold/italic button is enabled for all fonts. Unfortunately, this is considered as a bug from others’ point of view.

    For the second issue, it sounds like an Acrobat/Reader problem. Can you send this message in Acrobat Team blog?

    For the third mixing language problem, we’d like to have some detail. We appreciate if you can post the test form or send me (hguan [at] adobe [dot] com) the form so that we can look into it.

    All Adobe fonts are implemented by Adobe Font Technology team. I can’t help for the strokes issue. Again, we can forward your comment to Font Team if you can provide some detail.

    Thanks
    Henry

  3. Stefan Cameron on December 8th, 2006

    Thomas,

    Thanks for sending some test forms to Henry. We had a few people look at them to see what we could find.

    We believe the font issues you described are fixed as of Acrobat 7.0.7. Keep in mind that different fonts may use different strokes although it seems that the meaning of the characters remains the same (as of Acrobat 7.0.7+ and into Acrobat 8).

    Something that could affect how characters appear in a PDF is opening the PDF on a system that doesn’t have the Chinese Language Pack installed. Font substitution would occur in that case, which could distort some of the characters. When you open the PDF in Designer, it’s always a good thing to check the Report palette to see if any font substitution warnings were issued.

    With regards to xfa.event.newText not reporting the correct value when Chinese characters are typed into a text field, that is, in fact, a bug. It has been logged and will hopefully be addressed in a future release. Thanks for bringing it to our attention.