stolara:

I couldn't reproduce the problem here with your code. I keep getting the message:

$ perl 979790.pl
Wide character in syswrite at /usr/local/share/perl/5.10.1/PDF/Reuse.p
+m line 977, <FILE> line 212.
[download]

I'm supposing that either you're not handling UTF-8 cleanly enough in your program, or you're not providing adequate test data to reproduce it. (Try adding a single UTF-8 string in your program, so we don't need to locate a UTF-8 file.)

I went ahead and bodged something up to create a simple PDF with UTF-8 to see if I could find the text:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use utf8;
use PDF::API2;

my $content='∮ E⋅da = Q, roboticus n → ∞, &#87
+21; f(i) = ∏ g(i)';

my $pdf = PDF::API2->new();
my $page = $pdf->page();
$page->mediabox('Letter');
my $font = $pdf->ttfont('/usr/share/cups/fonts/FreeMono.ttf', -encodin
+g=>'utf-8');
my $text = $page->text();
$text->font($font, 20);
$text->translate(15,15);
$text->text($content);
$pdf->saveas('test_603.pdf');
[download]

It properly created the file, and Adobe Reader displayed it as I expected. But, as you reported in your setup, Adobe Reader wouldn't find a simple, little robot embedded in the text.

$ perl --version

This is perl, v5.10.1 (*) built for i486-linux-gnu-thread-multi

Linux Boink 2.6.32-39-generic #86-Ubuntu SMP Mon Feb 13 21:47:32 UTC 2
+012 i686 GNU/Linux

PDF::API2       2.019
Adobe Reader    9.3.2 04/01/2010
[download]

Update: Fixed the broken code tag. (I can't believe I missed it in preview!) Also: I cut & pasted the code into the text window, but it seems to have recoded the example string: '∮ E⋅da = Q, marco n → ∞, ∑ f(i) = ∏ g(i)'. I couldn't find a way (google wasn't very helpful to me, I can't seem to exclude enough irrelevent nodes) to get the utf-8 stuff into the code listing.

...roboticus

When your only tool is a hammer, all problems look like your thumb.