Set character spacing in typewriter?

[soonverysoon]

Hello everybody,

I can't figure this out on my own. Sometimes I need to fill in a form which has these comb-like fields where you are supposed to enter words one character at a time in separated squares.

How can I control spacing between characters when I am using the typewriter?

[Willy Van Nuffel]

In PDF-XChange Editor there is no option to change the standard character spacing like there is in Microsoft Word.
There is no option for expanded- or condensed-spacing.

What you can do, is use a font with a fixed character width - like "Courier New" - and play with the "font size" to make it fit into the several boxes.

If you do not succeed to achieve your goal with the above information, then please post a sample PDF.

Best regards.

[soonverysoon]

Thank you for replying..

Your assistance is very appreciated. Unfortunately, playing with font size does not always produce the best result.

This could serve as a feature request for a future release. Do the devs browse this forum?
It'd be nice if the ability to control character spacing in typewriter or another means of making text fit nicely into comb fields got implemented.

[Willy Van Nuffel]

This forum is also browsed by people of Tracker Development, but Tracker Support will surely pass them your request.

In form of an attachment, I post a PDF that can serve for testing?
The second row is much more easy to fill in than the first one, because of the Text Form fields, but maybe there is still another method (that can be developed).

Best regards.

[soonverysoon]

This forum is also browsed by people of Tracker Development, but Tracker Support will surely pass them your request.

In form of an attachment, I post a PDF that can serve for testing?
The second row is much more easy to fill in than the first one, because of the Text Form fields, but maybe there is still another method (that can be developed).

Best regards.

Yes, thanks for the example PDF. I managed to achieve a somewhat desirable effect by using a monospace font and separating characters with one or more spaces. While it will not work in ALL cases, it could probably work most of the time as a workaround. Still, it makes inputting and editing text a tedious task and requires careful adjusting of the character size.

[Stefan - PDF-XChange]

Hello soonverysoon,

The most convenient solution would have been for the form to have interactive form fields which you could click, type your data, and then the script for that field takes care of the formatting, but there are still forms that don't have those, or are mainly designed to e.g. be printed and filled in by hand. For those the boxes are more or less square in shape so using the correct font size and adding a space between each character should do. This is how I have filled in some forms in the past myself. Also - it's likely that all the boxes to fill in the same form will be one and the same size so you will need to set this up only once per form.

I do not believe that the PDF specification has provisions for custom character spacing in annotation objects, so implementing the solution at our end is probably impossible.

Regards,
Stefan

[soonverysoon]

Hello Stephen,

Thanks for the info.

I have attached a copy of the file Willy Van Nuffel kindly provided for testing purposes.

The first field is non-interactive and I entered digits there (the blue colored ones) using the typewriter tool in another PDF reader (not PDF-Xchange) which allows setting custom character spacing.

If you're interested you could take a look at it. They somehow managed to implement that.

Filling single-character-boxes_FILLED.pdf

[Patrick-Tracker Supp]

Hello soonverysoon,

Thank you for the post. If another PDF application is able to set character spacing in annotations, it is likely possible for us to implement as well. I will submit a formal feature request for this. However, before I do, could you please inform us as to which PDF software you used that allows you to control character spacing?

Thank you!

[soonverysoon]

Hello soonverysoon,

Thank you for the post. If another PDF application is able to set character spacing in annotations, it is likely possible for us to implement as well. I will submit a formal feature request for this. However, before I do, could you please inform us as to which PDF software you used that allows you to control character spacing?

Thank you!

Thank you. The application I used to enter text with custom spacing using the typewriter tool is Foxit Reader 8.2. I am attaching a screenshot of the tool to this message for ease of locating the tool:

Looks like .png is not allowed so I'll just post a dropbox link to the screenshot:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/236 ... xample.png

[Will - Tracker Supp]

Hi all,

I've confirmed this feature in Foxit and will pass this along in the form of a formal feature request (RT-3805). Do note that this is not a guarantee to implement, only a guarantee to seriously consider implementation.

Cheers,

[soonverysoon]

Thank you. I will surely move to PDF-Xchange exclusively if and when this feature gets implemented. I like it a lot more than competing products.

[Will - Tracker Supp]

[martinii]

Hi all,

Has anything changed in character spacing case? I need this option in form I've created:

image.png

I have 10.5.1 version od PDF-XChange Editor Plus

[Jordan - PDF XChange]

Hello martinii,

Welcome to the Forum.

Yes this function was added to the form fields options as property named Comb:

image.png

You will need to set your Spell Checker and Scroll properties to "No" to be able to enable it.