Android PDF Writer(APW) Enconding

Question

I am using Android PDF Write(APW) to create a PDF, but it doesn\'t work with some special characters(portuguese).

mypdf.addText(170, 50, 40,\"Coração\");


        

Answer 1

I took all the information provided, wrote the following simple unit test method and ran it.

public void test19192108()
{
    PDFWriter mPDFWriter = new PDFWriter(PaperSize.FOLIO_WIDTH, PaperSize.FOLIO_HEIGHT);
    mPDFWriter.setFont(StandardFonts.SUBTYPE, StandardFonts.COURIER, StandardFonts.WIN_ANSI_ENCODING);
    mPDFWriter.addText(170, 50, 40,"Coração");

    String pdfcontent = mPDFWriter.asString();
    outputToFile("helloworld19192108.pdf",pdfcontent,"ISO-8859-1");
}

(outputToFilebeing the helper method from the APW PDFWriterDemo class)

The result looks like this:

This seems pretty much to fulfill the expectations.

Thus, in whichever way it doesn't work with some special characters(portuguese) for the OP, some vital information is missing for reproducing the issue.

PS: Depending on the setup of the development environment, there might be an issue with non-ASCII characters in the source code. Thus, it might be a good idea to replace

    mPDFWriter.addText(170, 50, 40,"Coração");

with

    mPDFWriter.addText(170, 50, 40,"Cora\u00e7\u00e3o");

PPS: Adobe Reader after viewing a file generated like this wants to repair it. The reason is that the cross reference table is broken. The code generating entries for it is this:

public void addObjectXRefInfo(int ByteOffset, int Generation, boolean InUse) {
    StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
    sb.append(String.format("%010d", ByteOffset));
    sb.append(" ");
    sb.append(String.format("%05d", Generation));
    if (InUse) {
        sb.append(" n ");
    } else {
        sb.append(" f ");
    }
    sb.append("\r\n");
    mList.add(sb.toString());
}

(from CrossReferenceTable.java)

Counting the characters in this entry we get 10 + 1 + 5 + 3 + 2 = 21.

According to the specification, though:

Each entry shall be exactly 20 bytes long, including the end-of-line marker

(from section 7.5.4 Cross-Reference Table of ISO 32000-1)

When using (the current version of) the Android PDF Writer, you should fix this code, too.