HP program forms

[rprosperi]

(02-04-2015 07:49 PM)Dieter Wrote:  Of course I agree that if there is a standard, this has to be the target for any design. If other software does not agree with this standard, problems may arise.

In this case I assume it was not Abobe Acrobat that was used for designing the forms, and my PDF reader was "third party software" either. So I tried the file with an "official" Adobe Acrobat Reader version XI on Win7/64. Two things turned out:

• The form fields still appeared slightly low. Especially the fields for date, page, author etc. with the Helvetica font were almost half a line lower than what I would consider perfectly aligned. So Acrobat Reader XI shares this problem with Foxit Reader.
• The fields for the key sequence ("operations") look better. If the boxes for the keys are filled, Acrobat Reader XI uses a fixed Courier font that is (quite) properly aligned. Foxit Reader here uses the same (or a similar) Helvetica font which is slightly low, some characters even touch the lower border of the filled boxes.
  

So maybe this is a font issue. Foxit Reader seems to use the same font for all fields in the PDF form.

Dieter

Thanks for testing this so quickly Dieter, I was going to do so tonight with Adobe Reader. Fonts are probably the most common problem with other PDF writers (especially) and readers. This is a clear advantage Adobe has, with all the font knowledge and IP. And I've never understood why most PDF versions of paper forms seem to be out of alignment, but it is quite common. I guess with the design software it's tedious/difficult to "draw" the input boxes exactly, but haven't done it myself so don't know for sure.

So it appears from your results that Sylvain's HP-35 Form is somewhat typical in these 2 common areas. It will be interesting to see if a form that aligns well with Adobe Reader will also do so with other programs like Foxit.