I am using DomPDF, and some of the special characters are printed as a question-mark ("?").

An example was the checkmark ( ✓ ).

After some research, an article on stackoverflow showed the answer:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5136067/dompdf-special-characters

The main problem is the default font.

At the moment, the default CSS file in entity-print only sets a single font:
font-family: sans-serif;

Instead, it needs to have something like this; this below worked for me, but other font-families are of course possible: 

font-family: Verdana, Tahoma, "DejaVu Sans", sans-serif;

Then the characters showed up in the PDF.

It probably would be good to have something like this in the default CSS, or at least a comment in there that depending on the font/font-family that is used, you may not see some special-characters. However, since many people probably just try the default CSS, it should contain a working solution.

(Other note, I also changed the meta-tag in the template to this, but that seemed less of a problem) 

<head>
  <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
  ...
</head>
)
CommentFileSizeAuthor
#4 2851057-4.patch268 bytesbenjy
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Comments

hoporr created an issue. See original summary.

benjy’s picture

benjy CreditAttribution: benjy at PreviousNext commented

Which font does it end up using to render the tick? Is it possible to reproduce this on the /debug url? If so, we could add a test.

hoporr’s picture

hoporr CreditAttribution: hoporr commented

This is what I ended up using in the CSS, and the checkmarks showed up. Not sure which of these four the PDF generator actually uses, but apparently "sans-serif" by itself in the default style sheet can be ruled out :)

body {
  font-family: Verdana, Tahoma, "DejaVu Sans", sans-serif;
  
  font-size: 10px;
  color: black;
}
benjy’s picture

benjy CreditAttribution: benjy at PreviousNext commented
Status: Active » Needs review
FileSize
2851057-4.patch268 bytes

It seems to be DejaVu Sans packaged with Dompdf that has the good unicode support. Updated the fonts in the attached patch.

benjy’s picture

benjy CreditAttribution: benjy at PreviousNext commented
Status: Needs review » Fixed

Committed and pushed.

  • benjy committed 14eb7d1 on 8.x-2.x 
    Issue #2851057 by benjy, hoporr: DomPDF, special characters

Status: Fixed » Closed (fixed)

Automatically closed - issue fixed for 2 weeks with no activity.

sajidmanzoor’s picture

sajidmanzoor CreditAttribution: sajidmanzoor as a volunteer and commented

Hello
I am having the same issue with Chinese language.
I have tried the attached patch, added meta to page and added fonts to CSS but Chinese content is still not printing.
Please suggest a solution. I am using
Drupal 8.2.x

kaipipek’s picture

kaipipek CreditAttribution: kaipipek commented

I have problems printing Japanese (partly Chinese) characters as well. They are printed as either rectangles or question marks.