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pdfline-breaksflying-sauceropenpdf

Is there a way to force line-breaks in pdf acro fields?

As the title states, I am currently struggling to force line-breaks ("\n" respectively "\r\n") in a pdf-acro-field. I am using OpenPdf and FlyingSaucer (see dependencies for details) and managed to enable multi-line and rich-text of fields by setting the bit-flags 13 and 26 of the "Ff" property.

I was using the PDF-Reference ISO-3200_2008 as a guide (starting on page 442).
https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/devnet/pdf/pdfs/PDF32000_2008.pdf

Issue

I read an existing PDF and fill the acro fields programmatically. Something like this:

acroFields.setField("address", content);

The content is just a simple string with some newline characters. Nothing special.

My text is too long and will have to break at some point. When multiline is enabled, the text will break, but only if it reaches the end of the line. Basically, what I want to display is something like an address and some additional information on top. But not all lines are equal in size and for example I want to have information 1 and 2 on the same line and info 4 and 5 each on separate lines.

What I had in mind

<h2>What I want</h2>
<pre>Company XYZ
A brand here</pre>

<pre>Another Section
With some more info that goes further to the right
phone, email, website</pre>
<br>
<h2>What it looks like</h2>
<p>Company XYZ
A brand here
Another Section
With some more info that goes further to the right
phone, email, website</p>

Questions

  1. Is there a way to implement line-breaks in PDF in general?
  2. Is there a way to implement line-breaks programmatically?
  3. Can I do this in OpenPdf or FlyingSaucer?
  4. If there is no simple way - what would be a viable workaround?

Dependencies

compile group: 'com.github.librepdf', name: 'openpdf', version: '1.3.3'
compile group: 'com.googlecode.juniversalchardet', name: 'juniversalchardet', version: '1.0.3'
compile 'org.xhtmlrenderer:flying-saucer-core:9.1.18'
compile 'org.xhtmlrenderer:flying-saucer-pdf-openpdf:9.1.18'
Solution

  • It did not work, because the content (input coming from parsed html file) had \r\n in it, but somehow it does only work with \n so I did the following:

    content.replaceAll("\\\\r\\\\n", Chunk.NEWLINE.getContent()); // 2nd param is just "\n"

    This fixed my issue.