dompdf character encoding UTF-8

lostika picture lostika · May 5, 2013 · Viewed 66.6k times · Source

Im trying to create pdf with correct characters, but there are "?" chars. I created a test php file, where Im trying to fing the best solution. If Im open in the browser the html I looks like ok

UTF-8 --> UTF-8 : X Ponuka číslo € černý Češký 

But when I look into the pdf I see this

UTF-8 --> UTF-8 : X Ponuka ?íslo € ?erný ?ešký 

Here is my all code:

<html>
<head>
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/>
    <title>č s š Š</title>
</head>
<body>
<?php 

require_once("dompdf/dompdf_config.inc.php");
$tab = array("UTF-8", "ASCII", "Windows-1250", "ISO-8859-2", "ISO-8859-1", "ISO-8859-6", "CP1256"); 
$chain = '<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/> <style></style><title>č s š Š</title></head><body>';
foreach ($tab as $i) 
    { 
        foreach ($tab as $j) 
        { 
            $chain .= "<br> $i --> $j : ".iconv($i, $j, 'X Ponuka číslo € černý Češký <br>'); 
        } 
    } 
$chain .= '<p style="font-family: firefly, verdana, sans-serif;">??????X Ponuka číslo € černý Češký <br></p></body></html>';
echo $chain; 
echo 'X Ponuka číslo € černý Češký <br>'; 

$filename = 'pdf/_1.pdf';
$dompdf = new DOMPDF();
$dompdf->load_html($chain, 'UTF-8');
$dompdf->set_paper('a4', 'portrait'); // change these if you need to
$dompdf->render();
file_put_contents($filename, $dompdf->output());

?> 
</body>
</html>

What Im doing wrong? I tried many many options which I found :( Any idea?

Answer

BrianS picture BrianS · May 6, 2013

You should read over the Unicode How-to again. The main problem is that you don't specify a font that supports your characters. It looks like you've read the how-to, because you're using the font example from that document. However the example was not meant to apply globally to any document, dompdf doesn't include firefly (a Chinese character font) or Verdana by default.

If you do not specify a font then dompdf falls back to one of the core fonts (Helvetica, Times Roman, Courier) which only support Windows ANSI encoding. So always be sure to style your text with a font that supports Unicode encoding and has the characters you need to display.

With dompdf 0.6.0 you can use the included Deja Vu fonts. So the following should work (just the HTML):

<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/>
<style>
  body { font-family: DejaVu Sans, sans-serif; }
</style>
<title>č s š Š</title>
</head>
<body>
  <p>??????X Ponuka číslo € černý Češký <br></p>
</body>
</html>