Write cyrillic chars into PDF form fields with PDFBox

Question

I am using pdfbox 2.0.5 to fill out form fields of a PDF document using this code:

        doc = PDDocument.load(inputStream);
        PDDocumentCatalog catalog = doc.getDocumentCatalog();
        PDAcroForm form = catalog.getAcroForm();
        for (PDField field : form.getFieldTree()){
            field.setValue("должен");
        }

I get this error: U+0434 ('afii10069') is not available in this font Times-Roman (generic: TimesNewRomanPSMT) encoding: StandardEncoding with differences

The PDF document itself contains cyrillic text which is displayed fine. I have tried using different fonts. For "Arial Unicode MS" it wants to download a 50MB "Adobe Acrobat Reader DC Font Pack". Is this a requirement for cyrillic characters?

Which font do I have to specify in the text field to handle cyrillic (or asian) characters?

Thanks, Ropo

Answer 1

Adobe handles that by reusing the embedded font file in the {/Ubuntu} font and creates a new font resource from that. Here is a quick hack which can serve as a guide of how to achieve something similar. The code is specific to a sample I've got.

PDDocument doc = PDDocument.load(new File(...));
PDAcroForm acroForm = doc.getDocumentCatalog().getAcroForm();
PDResources formResources = acroForm.getDefaultResources();
PDTrueTypeFont font = (PDTrueTypeFont) formResources.getFont(COSName.getPDFName("Ubuntu"));

// here is the 'magic' to reuse the font as a new font resource
TrueTypeFont ttFont = font.getTrueTypeFont();

PDFont font2 = PDType0Font.load(doc, ttFont, true);
ttFont.close();

formResources.put(COSName.getPDFName("F0"), font2);

PDTextField formField = (PDTextField) acroForm.getField("Text2");
formField.setDefaultAppearance("/F0 0 Tf 0 g");
formField.setValue("öäüинформацию");

doc.save(...);
doc.close();

Answer 2

The solution was trivial: form.setNeedAppearances(true);

And then I remove the blue box of the field with: field.setReadOnly(true);