[pdftex] Dashed lines in \pdfannot

[James Quirk]

Heiko, 

On Sun, 17 Sep 2006, Heiko Oberdiek wrote:

> On Sat, Sep 16, 2006 at 01:23:49PM -0700, James Quirk wrote:
> 
> > > AR7/Linux also needs "/W 1".
> > The PDF Reference indicates that the /W entry is optional,
> > with a default value of 1, and my AR7.0.8/Linux is happy
> > when /W is left out.
> 
> My AR 7.0.8 05/22/2006 shows nothing, if /W is left out.
That's the same version of acroread that I'm using. Therefore I guess the 
difference in behaviour is that your settings are different to mine, or we 
are simply looking at different cases. Anyhow, the LaTeX file I used to 
answer Victor's question is:

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\pagestyle{empty}
\begin{document}
\section{Lines}
\pdfannot {
  /Subtype /Line
  /L [400 600 300 756]
  /LE [/ROpenArrow /RClosedArrow]
  /Border [5 3 2]
  /BS <<  /S /D /D [8 4 ] >>
  /IC [1 0 0]
  /C [0 0 0]
  /Cap true
  /Contents (The quick brown fox)
}
\end{document}

which I processed using:

   pdfeTeX 3.141592-1.30.6-2.2 (Web2C 7.5.5)

to get:

   http://www.galcit.caltech.edu/~jjq/DashedAnnot.pdf

It's worth noting that for a Line annotation the /BS entry
controls the appearance of the line and not the rectangular
border surrounding the widget as would be the case for other 
annotation types, say as in your example. And I suspect that 
this dual nature of the /BS dictionary is where the difference 
in our viewing experience lies. In fact this test file:

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\begin{document}
\pdfannot {
   /Type /Annot
   /BS <<  /S/D /D [8 4 ] /W 1>>
   /Rect [100 600 300 600]
   /Subtype/Link/A <</Type/Action/S/URI/URI(http://www.tug.org)>>
}
\end{document}

confirms that to be the case.

James