CODEWITHSUNDEEP
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Reputation: 107

Determine the Text that can Display in Multiline PDTextField

Is there a way to determine the text that will actually display in a PDTextField when the PDF prints? If I call setValue and then getValue, it returns all of the text even though it will not all display.

I am trying to fill out a form with a limited size multiline text field that has the notation to attach another page for more details. I would like to limit the text to that which will display and generate the added detail page.

Thanks for indulging a PDFbox newbie.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 697

Answers (1)

Maruan Sahyoun
Maruan Sahyoun

Reputation: 589

There is no direct way to find that out as the details of the text layout such as line breaks, padding, line spacing are hidden inside the non public class PlainTextFormatter inside the org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.interactive.formpackage. So you'd need to replicate that code.

PDFBox tries to resemble the calculations done by Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader but the details of such calculations are not part of the PDF specification. So doing your calculation is only valid for a similar layout model. Other form filling applications might have a slightly different layout model and as a result your results will not apply to these.

In addition to that Acrobat (and PDFBox) place text although it might be partially clipped. Look at the results of the AlignmentTest.javaunit test to see what I mean. So one might have a different expectation to what 'fitting' really means.

As I've thought about passing the information about which text fitted back to the calling application anyway I've opened an enhancement request https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/PDFBOX-3413 for that.

Upvotes: 2

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