iTextSharp international text

Question

Hi there,

I have a table in asp.net page,and trying to export it as a PDF file,I have couple of international characters that are not shown in generated PDF file,any suggestions,

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

You can try setting the encoding for the font you are using. In Java would be something like this:

BaseFont bf = BaseFont.createFont(BaseFont.HELVETICA, BaseFont.CP1252, BaseFont.EMBEDDED);

where the BaseFont.CP1252 is the encoding. Try to search for the exact encoding you need for the characters to be displayed.

Answer 2

The key for proper display of alternate characters sets (Russian, Chinese, Japanese, etc.) is to use IDENTITY_H encoding when creating the BaseFont.

Dim bfR As iTextSharp.text.pdf.BaseFont
  bfR = iTextSharp.text.pdf.BaseFont.CreateFont("MyFavoriteFont.ttf", iTextSharp.text.pdf.BaseFont.IDENTITY_H, iTextSharp.text.pdf.BaseFont.EMBEDDED)

IDENTITY_H provides unicode support for your chosen font, so you should be able to display pretty much any character. I've used it for Russian, Greek, and all the different European language letters.