First of all I apologiae if this question has already been answered elsewhere...I've tried googling and have failed. I am trying to modify a pdf document which has forms in it. They include combi-boxes with a tick as a selection. The best opensource pdf reader/editor that I have used to do this is evince which works brilliantly but fails to display the tick once selected. When I run this it does complain about fonts i.e. I get errors like:-

Error: Unknown font type: '???'
Error: Unknown font type: '???'
warning: layoutText: cannot convert U+2714.

I think that it may be a font problem???

Can anyone suggest how to fix this, or maybe a better option...I have tried quite a few other pdf viewers and evince seems best for the document I am modifying.

Thanks for your help

Here is a list of fonts which support
"check mark U+2714". Try setting Evince to use one of
these to see if that corrects the problem.

What distro/version are you using?

My preferred Linux PDF reader is Okular. It handles forms very nicely.

I have even used it for US income tax forms without issue. I experienced no issue with checkboxes.

Thank You bigrigdriver and frankbell for your help. I tried installing the various fonts as you kindly suggested. I selected them in the appropriate forms and still did not work. I tried Okular, evince, Master PDF Editor and others and none of these worked.

I must admit I am using quite an old version of Fedora i.e. Fedora 17 and evince is quite old. At the moment I dont want to risk an upgrade. I will probably do a re-install later on in the year. I have an old laptop that has an up-to-date installation of Zorin on it, so I think I will have a play with that and see how that goes.

The document that I have has a lot of forms on it with checkboxes and combi-boxes and to be honest evince on Fedora-17 nearly filled them all in. There was just the one form type that it failed with....because it was a tick I assumed that it was a font problem...it might still be, but even after installing some of the fonts and selecting them I still could not get the tick displayed.

I will try Zorin on my old laptop and see if that works. I will update this thread accordingly.

Thank you again for taking the time and trouble to try and help me.

Thanks for the update.

Hi...I tried more up to date version and it still did not work. I have spent a few days trying to understand the problem better. I downloaded the sources of both poppler and okular and built them. I added some diagnostics to the function layoutText within the poppler Annot.cc file.
The fonts file that I am trying to use is the ArialUnicodeMS which has the tick character. I have checked this using font-manager. I have managed to create a little noddy pdf file with one form in it and tryed running that using okular. I set the form to use the font ArialUnicodeMS. I think that part of my problem might be that the pdf file is treating the font as embedded and is simply not trying to use the external ArialUnicodeMS font installed on the system.

To reproduce the problem my form is a combo box with a tick as the selection...I select the tick and I get the error.
The diagnostics that I added gave me this output with the error "warning: layoutText: cannot convert U+2714"
Input Text
text = þÿ'^T
text length = 4
text=[0]=fffffffe
[1]=ffffffff
[2]=27
[3]=14
2714 represents the tick
Base Font name=ArialUnicodeMS
Font family=Arial Unicode MS
Original Font name=ArialUnicodeMS
Original Font Name length = 14
Font type=10 (fontCIDType2)
Embedded Font Name= ArialUnicodeMS
Embedded Font Name length = 14
No external Font file. ??????????????????????????
Font has toUnicode map = 0
warning: layoutText: cannot convert U+2714
returned outBuf =
text length = 0


From this it does look like its not using the external font file.
When I do properties it again does confirm that it is using embedded i.e. gives MWINCV+ CID TrueType Embedded(subset)
How do I make the pdf document use the external font file??? I tried using different packages to force using the external font file, but with no success.

I guess it should work with the embedded font...but it obviously does not, again I dont know why.


I would be grateful for any help on this
Thanks