Display Issues in Dynamic PDF Reports: Analysis and Search for Solutions

Question

Hi there,

We use dynamic PDF format for submitting internship follow-up reports via Moodle. Since the mid-autumn session of 2024, we have encountered several issues with the display of responses.

In many cases, the responses do not appear. By clicking on the fields, sometimes the text appears. I saw a post mentioning a similar problem. Following the recommendations made, we removed the background and border colors. When the issues started, the text field property options "Check spelling," "Multiline," and "Scroll long text" were selected. When we first encountered the problems, we found that enabling "Allow RTF formatting" resolved the issue for most PDFs. We then updated our PDF files to enable this function.

In January, we had another report submission, and the same display issues occurred. We tried isolating the problem by checking the PDF version, the conversion tool, the embedded fonts, the web browser, and the PDF filling mode (online or in Adobe), but there were no consistencies. We also recreated the PDF from scratch using a new Word file.

Moreover, we had a submission last week, and now some responses do not display at all. I tried clicking on the fields, changing the properties (font, size, RTF format), and verifying the embedded fonts, without success.

We are out of resources, and our team is starting to disengage due to these ongoing problems. PDF seems to be the most suitable solution for our needs; however, we do not understand why these issues have arisen and, more importantly, why they didn’t occur before mid-autumn 2024.

I would be deeply grateful if you could help us with this issue.

Thom Parker · Answer

What do you mean by "Dynamic"? This term has special meaning in the context of PDF. I means the form is an XFA form that can change size and move fields automatically as data is added, as opposed to a regular Arcrobat PDF Form, which is like a piece of paper and can't grow dynamically.

I think you may mean that you are using a standard interactive Acrobat Form.

The issues you've described are typical of forms filled out in non-compliant PDF viewers, such as Apple Preview, or jsut about anything on a mobile device or in a browser. The online environment is moving very fast and it may be that browsers started treating PDFs differently in the problem time frame.

There is only one solution to this issue, ensure the form is only filled on a compliant viewer. This can be done by blocking access to the regular form content in all cases except a compliant viewer. The block is a page cover that informs the user they need to open the file in a compliant viewer.

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