How to handle non-ASCII characters in Java using PDPageContentStream / PDDocument

Question

I use PDFBox to create PDF from my web application. The web application is built in Java and uses JSF. It takes content from a web form and places the content in a PDF document.

Example. The user will fill in inputTextArea (JSF tag) in the form and convert to PDF. I cannot handle non-ASCII characters.

How do I handle non-ASCII characters, or at least cut them out before putting them in a PDF file. Please help me with any suggestions or point me to any resources. Thank!

Answer 1

Since you are using JSF on JSP instead of Facelets (which is already implicitly using UTF-8), follow these steps to avoid using the default platform encoding (which is often ISO-8859-1, which is the wrong choice for handling most "non- ASCII "):

• Add the following line on top of all JSPs:

  <%@ page pageEncoding="UTF-8" %>
  

  This sets the response encoding to UTF-8 and sets the header encoding of the contents of the HTTP response to UTF-8. The latter will tell the client (webbrowser) to display and submit the page using the form using UTF-8.

• Create Filterone that performs the following actions in doFilter():

  request.setCharacterEncoding("UTF-8");
  

  Match this to FacesServletas follows:

  <filter-mapping>
      <filter-name>nameOfYourCharacterEncodingFilter</filter-name>
      <servlet-name>nameOfYourFacesServlet</servlet-name>
  </filter-mapping>
  

  This sets the request encoding of all JSF POST requests to UTF-8.

Unicode JSF. PDFBox, , iText, , , Unicode/UTF-8, , . , - .

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• Unicode - ?