APEXdisplays foreign characters perfectly but I can't in pl/pdf
My APEX application and reports display varchar fields with Chinese and Russian characters perfectly. When I try to generate a .pdf file from this data (using pl/pdf), the special characters show up as various nonsense characters.
How does APEX properly display these characters? Can I do something similar with pl/pdf. Below is what their website has to say on this matter:
What kind of character sets does PL/PDF support?
* Single byte
* AL32UTF8 Unicode
For single byte: According to the Adobe PDF specification, characters are encoded using cp1252 in a PDF document. If the database uses a different encoding, then the user needs to either set the default encoding or use the SetEncoding command in PL/PDF to adjust the encoding used.
For Unicode: If the database uses Unicode character sets, then there are two possibilities:
* If only one encoding is used throughout the whole PDF, then the same character sets can be used as with the single byte character sets. In this case PL/PDF converts the text to the single byte character set and then includes it in the PDF document. When PL/PDF finds a character that is not in the character set selected then a ‘?’ is displayed instead of the character.
* When multiple encoding standards are used in a PDF document, then the TTF font for the appropriate encoding must be embedded and ‘utf16’ encoding must be used. The size of the resulting PDF file will be larger because of the TTF embedding.