Hi Monks,

Below is a cut-down version of my code which allows me to enter characters like e-acute (by typing Alt-130) onto a web form, and it writes them back to the web page OK, but when it writes it to a PDF, the acute chars don't appear correctly.  I've worked around this for a couple of chars with the "quick hack" you can see in the code, but I'd like to have a proper fix for all special chars.  I'm guessing I might need to "use utf8", or something, and I have read some articles on Unicode & UTF8, but haven't worked out what I need to do here yet.

How can I get this code to write the special chars to the PDF file correctly, without the "quick hack"?

Also, am I supposed to have: 

Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8\n
AND 
<meta charset='UTF-8'>
Or what?  Seems a bit duplicated. 
#!/usr/bin/perl

use CGI;
use PDF::API2;

use constant mm => 25.4 / 72;

$cgi = new CGI;
$f1 = $cgi->param(f1);

#Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8\n
# <meta charset='UTF-8'>

if (defined($f1))
{
        open (FILE, ">utf8_test1.out") or die "Can't open outfile";
        print FILE $f1;
        close FILE;

        open (FILE, "<utf8_test1.out") or die "Can't open infile";
        $f2 = <FILE>;
        close FILE;

        $pdf = PDF::API2->new();

        $font1 = $pdf->corefont('Arial');

        $page = $pdf->page;             # Add blank page
        $page->mediabox(210/mm, 297/mm);

        $text = $page->text();

        $text->font($font1, 28);
        $text->translate(20/mm ,280/mm);

        # A quick hack to handle a couple of special chars
        $f2 =~ s/\303\251/\351/g;  # e-acute
        $f2 =~ s/\303\272/\372/g;  # u-acute

        $text->text('PDF Output:' . $f2);

        $pdf->saveas('utf8_test1.pdf');
}

print <<EOF;
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8\n
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang='en-NZ'>
<head>
        <title>Test UTF-8</title>
        <meta charset='UTF-8'>
</head>
<body>
<form method='post'>
        Input: <input type='text' name='f1' value='$f1'>
        <br>
        <input type='submit' name='submit' value='Submit'>
        <br>
        Output: $f1
</form>
</body>
</html>
EOF

[download]

Thanks.

In reply to Write special chars to PDF. UTF8? by tel2

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