APPENDIX H
1120
Compatibility and Implementation Notes
128. The Acrobat implementation of interactive forms displays the value of the
Status
entry, if any, in an alert note when importing an FDF file.
129. The only
Encoding
value supported by Acrobat 4.0 is
Shift−JIS
. Acrobat 5.0
supports
Shift−JIS
,
UHC
,
GBK
, and
BigFive
. If any other value is specified,
the default,
PDFDocEncoding
, is used.
130. Of all the possible entries shown in Table 8.96 on page 717, Acrobat 3.0
exports only the
V
entry when generating FDF, and Acrobat 4.0 and later
versions export only the
V
and
AP
entries. Acrobat does, however, import
FDF files containing fields that have any of the described entries.
131. If the FDF dictionary in an FDF file received as a result of a submit-form
action contains an
F
entry specifying a form other than the one currently
being displayed, Acrobat fetches the specified form before importing the
FDF file.
132. When exporting a form to an FDF file, Acrobat sets the
F
entry in the FDF
dictionary to a relative file specification giving the location of the FDF file
relative to that of the file from which it was exported.
133. If an FDF file being imported contains fields whose fully qualified names
are not in the form, Acrobat discards those fields. This feature can be use-
ful, for example, if an FDF file containing commonly used fields (such as
name and address) is used to populate various types of forms, not all of
which necessarily include all of the fields available in the FDF file.
134. As shown in Table 8.96 on page 717, the only required entry in the field
dictionary is
T
. One possible use for exporting FDF with fields containing
T
entries but no
V
entries is to indicate to a server which fields are desired
in the FDF files returned in response. For example, a server accessing a
database might use this information to decide whether to transmit all
fields in a record or just some selected ones. As noted in implementation
in the imported FDF file that do not exist in the form.
135. The Acrobat implementation of forms allows the option of submitting the
data in a submit-form action in HTML Form format for the benefit of ex-
isting server scripts written to process such forms. Note, however, that any
such existing scripts that generate new HTML forms in response need to
be modified to generate FDF instead.