Filling landscape PDF with PDFBox

I try to fill a PDF form with PDFBox and I managed to do it well with a portrait oriented document. But I have a problem when filling a document in landscape mode. The fields are filled up, but the text orientation is not good. It appear vertically like if it was still in portrait but in a rotation of 90 degrees.

Here is my simplified code:

PDDocument pdfDoc = PDDocument.load(MY_FILE);
PDDocumentCatalog docCatalog = pdfDoc.getDocumentCatalog();
PDAcroForm acroForm = docCatalog.getAcroForm();

acroForm.getField("aAddressLine1").setValue("ADDRESS1_HERE");
acroForm.getField("aAddressLine2").setValue("ADDRESS1_HERE");
acroForm.getField("country").setValue("COUNTRY_HERE");

pdfDoc.save(PATH_HERE);
pdfDoc.close();

Did you manage to fill a PDF document in landscape mode?

Thanks for your help.

The short answer

I'm afraid PDFBox does not yet (as of version 1.8.2) allow you to fill in landscape PDFs like the one you provided because it does not seem to query and factor in informations about the page the form field is located on.

The long answer

There are different ways you can define a page to be A4 landscape:

You can define it to have the A4 landscape dimensions directly by means of a media box definition:
```
/MediaBox [0, 0, 842, 595]
```
In this case the coordinates of your aAddressLine1 would be
```
/Rect[23.1711 86.8914 292.121 100.132]
```
or you can define it to have the A4 portrait dimensions and being rotated by 90° (or 270° obviously):
```
/MediaBox [0, 0, 595, 842]
/Rotate 90
```
In this case the coordinates of your aAddressLine1 are
```
/Rect[86.8914 23.1711 100.132 292.121]
```

Your example document uses the latter method.

Now PDFBox, when creating an appearance stream for that field, only looks at the rectangle defining the field but ignores the properties of the page. Thus, PDFBox sees a very narrow and very high textfield and fills it in just like that. It is completely unaware that the result will be rotated in a PDF viewer.

What it should have done is to also look at the page the field is located on. If that page has a /Rotate entry, it should create an appearance stream for the field which displays the text rotated in the opposite direction.

Alternatives

In a comment you also asked

Do you know another library I could use if PDFBox can't do what I want?

I have tested the feat with iText 5.4.2:

    PdfReader reader = new PdfReader(MY_FILE);
    OutputStream os = new FileOutputStream(PATH_HERE);
    PdfStamper stamper = new PdfStamper(reader, os);

    AcroFields acroFields = stamper.getAcroFields();
    acroFields.setField("aAddressLine1", "ADDRESS1_HERE");
    acroFields.setField("aAddressLine2", "ADDRESS1_HERE");
    stamper.close();

(The free iText version is licensed under the AGPL; you have to decide whether that's ok for your project. There is a commercial license, too, if it's not ok.)

I'm sure other PDF libraries also can do that, it's not too exotic a feature after all...

But I also tested PDF Clown 0.1.3 (trunk version), which did not work either:

File file = new File(MY_FILE);

Document document = file.getDocument();
Form form = document.getForm();
form.getFields().get("aAddressLine1").setValue("ADDRESS1_HERE");
form.getFields().get("aAddressLine2").setValue("ADDRESS1_HERE");

file.save(new java.io.File(PATH_HERE), SerializationModeEnum.Incremental);
file.close();