Display Unicode characters in converting Html to Pdf

Question

I am using itextsharp dll to convert HTML to PDF.

The HTML has some Unicode characters like α, β... when I try to convert HTML to PDF, Unicode characters are not sho

Answer 1

This has to be one of the most difficult problems that I've had to figure out to date. The answers on the web, including stack overflow has either poor or outdated information. The answer from Gregor is very close. I wanted to give back to this community because I spent many hours to get to this answer.

Here's a very simple program I wrote in c# as an example for my own notes.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.IO;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Threading.Tasks;
using iTextSharp.text;
using iTextSharp.text.pdf;
using iTextSharp.tool.xml;

namespace ExampleOfExportingPDF
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            //Build HTML document
            StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
            sb.Append("");
            sb.Append("
これは日本語のテキストの例です。
");
            sb.Append("");

            //Create our document object
            Document Doc = new Document(PageSize.A4);


            //Create our file stream
            using (FileStream fs = new FileStream(Path.Combine(Environment.GetFolderPath(Environment.SpecialFolder.Desktop), "Test.pdf"), FileMode.Create, FileAccess.Write, FileShare.Read))
            {
                //Bind PDF writer to document and stream
                PdfWriter writer = PdfWriter.GetInstance(Doc, fs);

                //Open document for writing
                Doc.Open();


                //Add a page
                Doc.NewPage();

                MemoryStream msHtml = new MemoryStream(System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(sb.ToString()));
                XMLWorkerHelper.GetInstance().ParseXHtml(writer, Doc, msHtml, null, Encoding.UTF8, new UnicodeFontFactory());

                //Close the PDF
                Doc.Close();
            }

        }

        public class UnicodeFontFactory : FontFactoryImp
        {
            private static readonly string FontPath = Path.Combine(Environment.GetFolderPath(Environment.SpecialFolder.Fonts),
          "arialuni.ttf");

            private readonly BaseFont _baseFont;

            public UnicodeFontFactory()
            {
                _baseFont = BaseFont.CreateFont(FontPath, BaseFont.IDENTITY_H, BaseFont.EMBEDDED);

            }

            public override Font GetFont(string fontname, string encoding, bool embedded, float size, int style, BaseColor color,
          bool cached)
            {
                return new Font(_baseFont, size, style, color);
            }
        }

    }
}

Hopefully this will save someone some time in the future.