Japanese characters not displayed correctly

[Derbeth]

See http://pl.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Kolekcje/Japoński

When you click "generate PDF" ("wersja PDF"), there are Japanese characters missing (eg. page 1, 3).

[heiko]

I confirm this error also exists when rendered with tools.pediapress.com.

Also the ruby-tag support seems to be broken.

[heiko]

same for other articles from ja.wikibooks.org - no japanese letters at all. strange as this once worked like a charm.

[volker]

The problem is probably the pdf-viewer you guys are using: Currently japanese fonts (and various others) are only rendered correctly with Acrobat reader. The reason is that we are currently using the "built-in" fonts from Adobe which are probably only usable with Acrobat reader. I know this is not ideal...

I am closing this bug as invalid. If my assumption is wrong and you can't see the japanese glyphs with Acrobat reader (plus the required font packs) please reopen

[Derbeth]

You cannot do such things! This is like making IE-only (Firefox only etc.) web pages! Lots of people that don't use Windows also don't have Acrobat Reader. There are people who use Windows, but choose alternatives to Adobe Reader, because they don't like it. As far as I know, on no Linux Acrobat Reader is used to render PDFs in web browser, even if Acrobat Reader is installed in the system. Besides, good Linux systems (like Ubuntu) have PDF support installed by default and it's not always easy to install proprietary Acrobat Reader there - so it'd be quite common on Linux that its users don't have Acrobat Reader at all.

As you can see above, two people has independently met problems with generated PDFs, so it's not that "everybody has Acrobat Reader". You cannot say "get lost, use Acrobat Reader". Even those ridiculous IE-only sites have a disclaimer saying "works only on Internet Explorer". There's no such disclaimer for PDF generation, so users (and Wikibooks authors) will see errors and don't know what to do with it, because noone has told them, they should use Acrobat Reader.

[volker]

I totally agree with you that requiring Acrobat reader is not a good idea. I am also aware of the problem this causes for linux users, since I am one of them. Even on windows I did not use Acrobat reader because I prefered the slimmer and faster alternatives that are freely available.

The solution is to rewrite the font-handling code and use open source fonts for the various scripts and embed them in the pdf.

I opened a ticket for that: http://code.pediapress.com/wiki/ticket/363

If you agree, I'd close this ticket again. But if there still open issues or questions I am certainly open for further discussion ;)

[Derbeth]

Ok, let's close it.

[volker]

closing this one now. I'll try to change the font handling soon