Font family, size, and 'style' params not working/changing in AnnotationBuilder's free_text method

[joerex1418]

I'm just trying to add free text to a blank page using the AnnotationBuilder class. Some of the parameters seem to work just fine (text, rect, colors) but it looks like there is an issue with changing the font. No matter what I change it to, the font family and size, and style (bold/underline params) don't change at all.

Environment

Which environment were you using when you encountered the problem?

$ python -m platform
macOS-12.6-x86_64-i386-64bit

$ python -c "import PyPDF2;print(PyPDF2.__version__)"
2.11.1

Code + PDF

This is a minimal, complete example that shows the issue:

from PyPDF2 import PdfReader, PdfWriter
from PyPDF2.generic import AnnotationBuilder

writer = PdfWriter()

writer.add_blank_page(612, 792)

annotation_1 = AnnotationBuilder.free_text(
    "This is supposed to be 20pt Courier",
    rect=(400, 500, 480, 600),
    font="Courier",
    bold=True,
    italic=True,
    font_size="20pt",
    font_color="000000",
    border_color="0000ff",
    background_color="cdcdcd",
)

annotation_2 = AnnotationBuilder.free_text(
    "This is supposed to be 36pt Helvetica",
    rect=(20, 500, 200, 600),
    font="Helvetica",
    bold=True,
    italic=True,
    font_size="36pt",
    font_color="000000",
    border_color="0000ff",
    background_color="cdcdcd",
)

writer.add_annotation(page_number=0, annotation=annotation_1)
writer.add_annotation(page_number=0, annotation=annotation_2)

with open('pdfs/output.pdf','wb') as f:
    writer.write(f)

Here is an image of the resulting PDF:

[KingSlayer907]

I was having this same issue and came across your post, you may moved on by now but I figured I would post my partial solution. I was able to get font family and font size working by editing the annotation builder definition file, particularly the bg_color_str code. Here is the modified code (starts on line 92), I added the font name and font size to the bg_color_str after comparing an annotation I read in vs what annotation builder was creating. I wasn't able to get bold and italic working though.

    bg_color_str = ""
    for st in hex_to_rgb(border_color):
        bg_color_str = bg_color_str + str(st) + " "
    bg_color_str = bg_color_str + "rg /"
    bg_color_str = bg_color_str + font + " " + font_size.replace("pt"," Tf")

[pubpub-zz]

Have to tried to do some reverse engineering creating an annotation with Acrobat Reader (or else),save it and then check how the fields are encoded with PdfReader ?

[cbacary]

I am having the same issue. Furthermore, I think this should be labelled as a bug.

To reproduce:

from pypdf import PdfReader, PdfWriter
from pypdf.annotations import FreeText

writer = PdfWriter()
writer.add_blank_page(width=2200, height=2800)

# Create the annotation and add it
annotation = FreeText(
    text="Hello World\nThis is the second line!",
    rect=(50, 550, 200, 650),
    font="Arial",
    bold=True,
    italic=True,
    font_size="50pt",
    font_color="00ff00",
    border_color="0000ff",
    background_color="cdcdcd",
)

writer.add_annotation(page_number=0, annotation=annotation)

with open('written.pdf', 'wb') as fp:
    writer.write(fp)

Changing font_size parameter changes nothing on the written pdf file.