Using Java PDFBox library to write Russian PDF

Question

I am using a Java library called PDFBox trying to write text to a PDF. It works perfect for English text, but when i tried to write Russian text inside the PDF the letters appeared so strange. It seems the problem is in the font used, but i am not so sure about that, so i hope if anyone could guide me through this. Here is the important code lines :

PDTrueTypeFont font = PDTrueTypeFont.loadTTF( pdfFile, new File( "fonts/VREMACCI.TTF" ) );  // Windows Russian font imported to write the Russian text.
font.setEncoding( new WinAnsiEncoding() );  // Define the Encoding used in writing.
// Some code here to open the PDF & define a new page.
contentStream.drawString( "отделом компьютерной" ); // Write the Russian text.

The WinAnsiEncoding source code is : Click here

--------------------- Edit on 18 November 2009

After some investigation, i am now sure it is an Encoding problem, this could be solved by defining my own Encoding using the helpful PDFBox class called DictionaryEncoding.

I am not sure how to use it, but here is what i have tried until now :

COSDictionary cosDic = new COSDictionary();
cosDic.setString( COSName.getPDFName("Ercyrillic"), "0420 " ); // Russian letter.
font.setEncoding( new DictionaryEncoding( cosDic ) );

This does not work, as it seems i am filling the dictionary in a wrong way, when i write a PDF page using this it appears blank.

The DictionaryEncoding source code is : Click here

Answer 1

The long story is this - in order to do unicode output in PDF from a TrueType font, the output must include a ton of detailed and seemingly superfluous information. What it comes down to is this - inside a TrueType font the glyphs are stored as glyph ids. These glyph ids are associated with a particular unicode character (and IIRC, a unicode glyph internally may refer to several code points - like é referring to e and an acute accent - my memory is hazy). PDF doesn't really have unicode support other than to say that there exists a mapping from UTF16BE values in a string to glyph ids in a TrueType font as well as a mapping from UTF16BE values to Unicode - even if it's identity.

• a Font dictionary of Subtype Type0 with
  • a DescendantFonts array with an entry described below
  • a ToUnicode entry that maps UTF16BE values to unicode
  • an Encoding set to Identity-H

Output from one of my unit tests on my own tools looks like this:

13 0 obj
<< 
   /BaseFont /DejaVuSansCondensed 
   /DescendantFonts [ 4 0 R  ]   
   /ToUnicode 14 0 R 
   /Type /Font 
   /Subtype /Type0 
   /Encoding /Identity-H 
>> endobj

14 0 obj
<< /Length 346 >> stream
/CIDInit /ProcSet findresource begin 12 dict begin begincmap /CIDSystemInfo <<
/Registry (Adobe) /Ordering (UCS) /Supplement 0 >> def /CMapName /Adobe-Identity-UCS
def /CMapType 2 def 1 begincodespacerange <0000> <FFFF> endcodespacerange 1
beginbfrange <0000> <FFFF> <0000> endbfrange endcmap CMapName currentdict /CMap
defineresource pop end end

endstream % note that the formatting is wrong for the stream

• a Font dictionary of Subtype CIDFontTYpe2 with
  • a CIDSsytemInfo
  • a FontDescriptor
  • DW and W
  • a CIDToGIDMap that maps from character ID to glyph ID

Here's the one from the same test - this is the object in the DescendantFonts array:

4 0 obj
<< 
   /Subtype /CIDFontType2 
   /Type /Font 
   /BaseFont /DejaVuSansCondensed 
   /CIDSystemInfo 8 0 R 
   /FontDescriptor 9 0 R 
   /DW 1000 
   /W 10 0 R 
   /CIDToGIDMap 11 0 R 
>>

8 0 obj
<< 
   /Registry (Adobe)
   /Ordering (UCS)
   /Supplement 0 
>>
endobj

Why am I telling you this? What does it have to do with PDFBox? Just this: Unicode output in PDF is, frankly, a royal pain in the butt. Acrobat was developed before there was Unicode and it was painful from the start to have CJK encodings without Unicode (I know - I worked on Acrobat then). Later Unicode support was added, but it really felt like it was glommed on. One would hope that you would just say /Encoding /Unicode and have strings that start with the thorn and y-dieresis characters and off you go. No such luck. If you don't put in every detailed thing (and really, Acrobat, embedding a PostScript program to translate to Unicode? WTH?), you get a blank page in Acrobat. I swear, I am not making this up.

At this point, I write PDF generation tools for a separate company (.NET right now, so it won't help you), and I made it a design goal to hide all that nonsense. All text is unicode - if you only use those character codes that are the same a WinAnsi, that's what you get under the hood. Use anything else, you get all this other stuff with it. I'd be surprised if PDFBox does that work for you - it is a serious hassle.

Answer 2

The solution is very Simple.

1) You must find fonts compatible with the characters you want to display.
2) Download locally the .ttf file of the fonts.
3) Load fonts from your application

For Example this is what you have to do in case you want to use Greek characters:

content = new PDPageContentStream(document, page);
pdfFont = PDType0Font.load( document, new File( "arialuni.ttf" ) )
content.setFont(pdfFont, fontSize);