I have a problem with iTextSharp which looks like it could be a bug.
I have a combed text field and when using iTextSharp to add Arabic text to it, the Arabic letters initially appear reversed when the field is "highlighted". So 'ف ا د ي' appears 'ي د ا ف'.
The moment I click on the field, the highlight disappears and the text appears in the correct direction.
This happens regardless of the direction and alignment and only happens in combed text fields.
Can anyone offer any solutions to this?
Note: I've added the iText tag as well because I have a hunch that this issue is not specific to iTextSharp only and I hope I can replicate any workarounds or solutions in iTextSharp. Regards,
You can usually fix this by setting GenerateAppearances to false on the form object.
Annotations in a PDF (which form fields are a version of) can have different "states" and for each of these "states" you can specify how you want a renderer to display that state. For instance, a checkbox can either be "checked" or "not checked" which is given, but how to render that actual checkmark isn't. Maybe an "X", maybe a ✓, maybe a ☑ or maybe something totally different. These different states are called their Appearance State.
If you don't set an appearance state for an annotation then you are effectively surrendering control of that state to the PDF renderer and letting it do whatever it wants.
Adobe's renderers (Acrobat and Reader) are the de facto standard for PDF renderers and recent ones are actually really good at "filling in the blanks", especially when it comes to things like RTL and many non-English/Latin things. Other renderers out there, including Google's, Apple's, Microsoft's and even your printer might not be as good at this, however, so you might want to test this.