Sonoma field/font glitch in PDF forms; how do I fix this?

Preview frequently fails with such forms as it is always behind with the latest PDF standards.

Download the free Adobe Acrobat Reader and use that.

At the bottom left of the print box, click the Printer button to make sure it's using the correct device. But much more importantly, click the Page Setup button. The reader loves to use Any Printer, which doesn't account for your printer's actual printable margins. Choose your printer.

After that, choose a size option that works. I always try Actual size first. But if it's too big, I'll go with Fit next (Shrink oversized pages tends to do exactly the same thing as Fit). If none of those work, you can use Custom Scale to make it fit.

Okay, that makes sense on the form color now. It needs to be blind to the scanner that reads in the form fields. Other than that, I think I see what's going on. At the most basic, whoever built this form did a lousy job.

First, here's what the 21A field looks like in Preview, Acrobat Reader, and Master PDF Editor (in that order). The last looks odd because the editor still has no ColorSync controls.

What I see on the screen is how it prints. But what's also somewhat obvious is the size of the font (or even the font itself) isn't the same from app to app. And there's a reason for that.

1) Made correctly, fonts used in a PDF should be embedded so no OS has to guess, or look for what's supposed to be there. There are none. Worse, each app thinks it's defaulting to Helvetica. But because the form is so poorly built, it can't even decide between that and Arial.

2) Here's the main problem. If I go into editing mode, every single form field has Helv assigned to it. There is no such font.

Correctly done, they should have chosen an actual font as below.

So, what's going on? I would have to guess you have some other third party version of Helvetica and/or Arial installed that's causing the form to go haywire. See if you can find any you can disable.

Try the same PDF document in a current version of Adobe Acrobat Reader. The PDF Form designer does have control over the form contents and their behavior. If they used Adobe Acrobat JavaScript (AcroJS) to achieve that, then Apple's Preview simply ignores AcroJS syntax which may allow the forms to misbehave. Also, the PDF creation tool that created the form fields may have a bearing on how Apple's Preview handles the form data, though Adobe's Acrobat Reader is coded to handle that type of form content.

Hello Scott,

I'm pretty busy tomorrow, so I quick took a few moments to try this.

I filled out a lot of the form, dropped in a JPEG of my signature and printed it to our Xerox VersaLink C405. It printed as expected. I did use the fit option as actual size was a bit too big.

I had originally dropped in my signature where the patient signs about midway down on the right. And tried again putting it in the physician's box at the lower let. But either way, nothing was cut off and all information printed.

I don't know if it makes any difference (probably not), but my signature file is grayscale rather than RGB.

Ah! I didn't try that field. By cut off, I thought you meant it was chopping off an entire horizontal section of 21A when printed, not the field itself.

I'll have to wait until later (maybe early) tomorrow to try it again. But that looks like a flaw in the design of the form itself. When a PDF with forms is built, the person putting it together chooses the font and point size for each form field. Looks like they screwed up on that one.

This is a PDF/X-1a:2001 document created by Adobe Illustrator CC 23.0 on a Mac using the Adobe PDF Library 15. It was created in 2019 and last modified in 2022. It is a Spot color PDF using CMYK Pantone color swatches.

On my iPad at the moment doing some reading.

Is this a PDF anyone can download? If so, please post a link to it and I'll try it tomorrow to see what results I get.

That is very bizarre. I'll have to try and remember to test both.