Comment 0 for bug 192398

Binary package hint: pdftk

The generate_fdf tool outputs field names and field values in what appears to be UTF-16 format. To verify:

$ wget http://koivi.com/fill-pdf-form-fields/Project2.pdf
$ pdftk Project2.pdf generate_fdf output Project2.fdf
$ less Project2.fdf

(The "may be a binary file" will show.) The field titles ("Text1", "Text2", and so on) are self-contained UTF-16 strings, with their own Byte Order Marks (FE FF) at the beginning. Additionally, the field values consist only of a bare BOM.

This makes it very difficult to manually edit the fields; it also appears to be unnecessary, since entering plain ASCII text in the fields generates the same output as entering UTF-16 text when merging the FDF file back in with fill_form.

I am running pdftk 1.40-2ubuntu3 on Ubuntu Dapper.