Rendering to PDF in Simplified Chinese

grather

<p>I have a Birt Report rendering to PDF.</p><p>The report was localized and the selected Locale was zh_CN.</p><p> </p><p>Problem was some of the characters were missing. And some of the characters were incorrectly being highlighted.</p><p> </p><p>So my guess was the font being used did not have all the data that was needed.</p><p> </p><p>Here is what I learned and how I solved my issue.</p><p> </p><p>First I needed to figure out what font was actually bing used.</p><p> </p><p>To determine this In Acrobat Reader -- > file -- properties</p><p>I found when there was simplified the Msung Light was the font being embedded</p><p> </p><p>After a bit of talking to my client. I found that SimSun.ttf was a good option for Simplified Chinese.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>And to make it a bit more challenging my client was in production and could not make any server changes. So could I deliver the font in the application and use that.</p><p> </p><p>So pdf is rendered by BIRT using iText. And that there is a config_PDF.xml that needs to be modified</p><p>to get the font SimSun.ttf to be used for Simplified Chinese I modified one line</p><p><composite-font name="all-fonts"></p><p>   <font font-family="SimSun" catalog="Chinese" /></p><p></composite-font></p><p> </p><p>But this file is the BIRT world is in a signed jar file.</p><p>In the version I am using it is org.eclipse.birt.runtime_4.2.2.v20130216-1152.jar</p><p> </p><p>To remove the signature.</p><p>Open in WinZip remove the EC:ISPE_.rsa and the ECLI{PSE_SF  from the META_INF  directory</p><p>And modified the MANIFEST.MF file to remove all the Signature parts. Everything but the first 5 lines were removed.  Now the jar dosn't throw security warning.</p><p>And when creating a Simplified Chinese PDF the SimSun.ttf will be used.</p><p> </p><p>But still need to make there font dynamically available. If you can install the font. All is fine.</p><p> </p><p>But I could not due to client restrictions.</p><p> </p><p>So I put the file in the ear file.</p><p>Then at startup copied that SimSun.ttf to the file  system (I used the /tmp dir but any directory will work)</p><p> </p><p>Then need to tell iText the font is available.</p><p> </p><p>All that is needed is</p><p>FontFactory.registerDirectory(fontsdir.getAbsolutePath());</p><p> </p><p>Now all is working with my PDF in chinese.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p>

mwilliams

This would be a good post for the <a data-ipb='nomediaparse' href='http://developer.actuate.com/community/devshare/'>devShare</a&gt; so others can find it easier.