Re^2: PDF::API2 / unicode characters leads me to believe that the PDF core fonts are not Unicode-compatible. I take it you are using those?

Having taken a closer look at PDF::Report, I'm left with the impression that there's no real way to get it to use external fonts. You could shell out to PDF::API2 (which it wraps) using ->getPDFAPI2Object() and then call ->ttfont() on that, but there's no way in PDF::Report to apply the resulting font object to your text, so you'd have to keep using ->getPDFAPI2Object() -- to add text, then to add pages, and so on, and in the end it'd be easier to just use PDF::API2 directly.

Here's some skeleton code that Works For Me:

#!usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use utf8;

use PDF::API2;

my $pdf = PDF::API2->new();
my $page = $pdf->page();
my $font = $pdf->ttfont('./DejaVuSans.ttf');
my $text = $page->text();

$text->font($font, 20);
$text->translate(100, 700);
$text->text('...');

$pdf->saveas('test.pdf');
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(Unicode string stripped out due to the Monastery not being willing to handle it.)

Thank you. I was really hoping to take advantage of the ::Report's simplicity. I guess I'll have to learn the hard way to do it.

You're welcome. Perhaps you could ask the author of PDF::Report to add support for using external (TTF) fonts? Another method like the following would likely be all that's needed:

sub setTTFont {
  my ( $self, $fontfile, $size )= @_;

  if (exists $self->{__font_cache}->{$fontfile}) {
    $self->{font} = $self->{__font_cache}->{$fontfile};
  }
  else {
    $self->{font} = $self->{pdf}->ttfont($fontfile);
    $self->{__font_cache}->{$fontfile} = $self->{font};
  }

  $self->{fontname} = $fontfile;
}
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In other words, pretty much exactly the same as ->setFont(), but calling ->ttfont() rather than ->corefont() on the underlying PDF::API2 object.

(Notes - a) this'd go into PDF::Report, of course, not your script; b) completely untested; c) uses the same fontcache as ->setFont(), which may or may not be a good design choice; d) could be refactored to avoid code duplication (e.g. have this and ->setFont() call an internal helper routine).)