I've been looking at some of the font pages in the iText Tutorial here:
http://itextdocs.lowagie.com/tutorial/ but there are two things which are
confusing me regarding the writing of Asian characters.
Firstly there is the explaination of the IDENTITY_H and IDENTITY_V
encodings:"In the next example, we are passing the value IDENTITY_H as
encoding. BaseFont.IDENTITY_H and BaseFont.IDENTITY_V are not really encodings.
They indicate that the unicode character wil be looked up in the font and
stored as-is, taking two bytes of space. It's the only way to have Asian fonts
and some encodings left out by Adobe such as Thai. For Europe or the
Middle-East, it is better to use an available encoding that will store a single
byte per character. Fonts with BaseFont.IDENTITY_H or BaseFont.IDENTITY_V will
always be embedded no matter what you enter as third parameter."
So working through the examples there, it seems I'd be using BaseFont.CP1252 as
the encoding for regular English text, and BaseFond.IDENTITY_H when I need to
use double byte characters. So I tried to make a test pdf with some text, using
the font "Microsoft YaHei" (which according to the windows character map
contains chinese characters).
First try:--------------- Font font = new
Font(BaseFont.CreateFont(@"C:\Windows\Fonts\msyh.ttf", BaseFont.CP1252,
BaseFont.EMBEDDED), 12); document.Add(new Paragraph("Hello", font));
document.Add(new Paragraph("你好", font));---------------This gave a
133kb pdf file where only the English "Hello" displayed (no Chinese text showed
up under it)
Second try:--------------- Font font = new
Font(BaseFont.CreateFont(@"C:\Windows\Fonts\msyh.ttf", BaseFont. IDENTITY_H ,
BaseFont.EMBEDDED), 12); document.Add(new Paragraph("Hello", font));
document.Add(new Paragraph("你好", font));---------------This gave a
34kb pdf file where the English "Hello" displayed, and below it were two
correct Chinese characters.
In both cases I've asked for the font to be embedded, why is the pdf created by
the first try larger?
In the second try, using IDENTITY_H caused both the English and Chinese text to
show up. So is it fine to specify IDENTITY_H as the encoding even for normal
English text? i.e. as oppossed to something like this:---------------
Font font1 = new Font(BaseFont.CreateFont(@"C:\Windows\Fonts\msyh.ttf",
BaseFont.CP1252, BaseFont.EMBEDDED), 12); document.Add(new
Paragraph("Hello", font1));
Font font2 = new
Font(BaseFont.CreateFont(@"C:\Windows\Fonts\msyh.ttf", BaseFont.IDENTITY_H,
BaseFont.EMBEDDED), 12); document.Add(new Paragraph("你好",
font2));---------------
The problem I'm trying to solve here, is that I need to create something which
can accept text input from a user. The input can be either English characters,
or it could be in Asian fonts...such as Chinese writing. And that text needs to
be written to a PDF. Is it okay to always use BaseFont.IDENTITY_H? If not, and
I should use BaseFont.CP1252 for English text, is there any way to tell what
kind of text input I'm receiving?
For example, in the first try above, the Chinese font simply did not show up.
Is there any way to check whether printing out a certain string with a certain
font (in this case the two chinese characters with msyh.ttf using CP1252) is
going to work, and if not redo it using IDENTITY_H instead?
It seems to me I should just use IDENTITY_H regardless of whether the input
text I'm receiving is English writing or something like Chinese.
The second thing is that this tutorial page:
http://itextdocs.lowagie.com/tutorial/fonts/getting/index.php makes mention of
using iTextAsian for CJK writing. When and why would you use that, as oppossed
to simply writing asian text using IDENTITY_H and a font which contains chinese
(or japanese, korean, etc.) characters like Microsoft YaHei?
If anyone could give some insight here, or just point me to some relevant
documentation/information, would be much appreciated.
Thanks in advance.
_________________________________________________________________
Take a peek at other people's pay and perks Check out The Great Australian Pay
Check
http://clk.atdmt.com/NMN/go/157639755/direct/01/
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Come build with us! The BlackBerry(R) Developer Conference in SF, CA
is the only developer event you need to attend this year. Jumpstart your
developing skills, take BlackBerry mobile applications to market and stay
ahead of the curve. Join us from November 9 - 12, 2009. Register now!
http://p.sf.net/sfu/devconference
_______________________________________________
iText-questions mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/itext-questions
Buy the iText book: http://www.1t3xt.com/docs/book.php
Check the site with examples before you ask questions:
http://www.1t3xt.info/examples/
You can also search the keywords list: http://1t3xt.info/tutorials/keywords/
