Adobe Vulnerabilities Everywhere
Tuesday, August 25th, 2009 Posted in Computers/Internet | No Comments »Uh-oh: 80% of web users running unpatched versions of Flash/Acrobat. These are being exploited, so check your system! #
“Expected dict” Errors in FDF Acrobat Forms
Monday, October 24th, 2005 Posted in Troubleshooting, Web Design | 15 Comments »Today I was trying to fix a problem in a section of a website that hadn’t been changed in roughly 5 years. The page in question retrieved data from a database and filled out an Acrobat form using FDF. Under some circumstances, Adobe Reader would generate an error message, “Expected a dict object.” Then it would freeze, and crash the web browser for good measure.
This site was built with ColdFusion, and used a then-freely-available library called PDFFormFiller.cfm (I can’t find any sign of it now) to generate the FDF code. After saving the offending FDF to a file (eliminating the browser as a factor), I started manually editing the code to see what happened.
The problem turned out to be parentheses appearing in the form data. FDF uses parentheses-delimited strings, and it was finding ) in the code and trying to parse what was left as FDF tokens. The solution was simple: just escape the parentheses as \( or \). Read the rest of this entry »
