PDF compatibility issues: special characters not showing up.

Hi all,

We’re getting feedback from some our customers, that special characters (like German Umlauts) are not showing up on our PDF-invoices generated in SuiteCRM. They look fine in many PDF-viewers, but apparently not all (and it’s been reported a few times over the last months already, so not only isolated incidents).
Who could point out to me where to look for a possible resolution to this? Is it possible to change settings in the pdf-library used by SuiteCRM? Or would the complete pdf-library need to be upgraded? How could I find out what exactly is causing this, i.e. how to troubleshoot this?

thanks,
John

Hi,
Maybe it’s can help. I don’t use this module (pdf template, invoice) but i make my pdf directly by hand ( html and controller).
I have sometime special char not appears, it’s really html error or text encoding issue. Sample, a “html space” or “euro symbol” or “carriage return”
Other sample, i have a number field : 2 char … => pdf OK, 3 char => pdf don’t print next line !!?
As you see, my problem was html error.
I have too add some fonts from https://github.com/tecnickcom/tcpdf.
Good luck

Just opened the PDF in Acrobat Reader. Upon opening I get the error:

Cannot extract the embedded font 'MPDFAA+DejaVuSansCondensed'. Some characters may not display or print correctly.

What does this tell me?

I’m defining my font in every html-tag that includes text as, e.g.

<span style="font-family: Arial;">geschätzt</span>

If I use

font-family: serif;

the error message is not displayed when opening in Adobe Reader (but font looks different of course).

Ah, seems to be an issue with newest Adobe Reader version. Other PDF readers have no issues.

It’s discussed here. I couldn’t fix it by the suggested method of replacing the ttf files. So I’ll just have to wait until Adobe fixes the bug.

https://forums.adobe.com/thread/2181902

Hi,
i reply for my experiment :
i know " or ’ are not rendering same thing
you have ä … hum, maybe find html special char for this…

I repeat, very hard to find whats happened with html to pdf.

Good luck, maybe better programmer can respond.

As already pointed out, it’s an Adobe bug. They already have a patch online. I assume they will distribute it as an update soon. Then the problem is a goner.