Missing characters in filled pdf using PDFTk with encoding UTF-8

Question

I'm trying to fill pdf documents using PDFTk. Script working fine, it fills inputs in form but I don't get special characters [polish charset: UTF-8 or ISO-8859-2].

Script: https://github.com/mikehaertl/php-pdftk

The weird thing is that generated pdf actually has polish characters when I click on field.

Before click:

After click on field:

---

Default encoding is set to UTF-8. The problem is that PDFTk can't use chars outside the standard ASCII with FDF form fill. It doesn't allow multi-byte characters.

What I did:

1. Add fonts to pdf files (checked and files has font)
2. Create fields in pdf files with default font (Arial)
3. Change encoding in script (function fillForm) to ISO-8859-2
4. Change data values encoding (iconv or mb_convert_encoding)
5. Change functions encoding and data value encoding to ISO-8859-2
6. Flatten pdf after filling the form
7. Read all topics about this problem in stackoverflow, google

UPDATE (25.03.2016): Findout that pdf documents works fine on some computers. Some people have polish characters and other don't. All of us have right fonts (with polish charset). I used default Arial or Times New Roman. Fonts are also embed in that file.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

you need to run pdftk with need_appearances as an argument.

kudos to the guys from this issue on github.