ReportLab: Arabic characters are displayed as black squares.

Question

I try for weeks to create pdf reports in Arabic, but I failed. I use ReportLab with two packages for building the Arabic characters namely bidi.algorithm and arabic_reshaper. In the console the characters are well organized but in the pdf there are only black square.

import reshaper
from bidi.algorithm import get_display
heading = get_display(reshaper.reshape(unicode('العربية', encoding='utf-8')))
print heading

The output in console : العربية

But in the generated pdf file : ▀ ▀ ▀ ▀ ▀

Thank you in advance.

can you please add a minimal and runable example of your code? — Fookatchu, Mar 19 '14 at 18:14
The code in the question is runable but you should insall the modules : -Arabic-Reshaper and bidi.algorithm — Khairy, Mar 24 '14 at 10:12

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited Sep 16 '14 at 22:24

I faced the same problem and came up with the following solution:

import reshaper
from bidi.algorithm import get_display
from reportlab.platypus import SimpleDocTemplate, Paragraph
from reportlab.pdfbase import pdfmetrics
from reportlab.lib.styles import ParagraphStyle
from reportlab.pdfbase.ttfonts import TTFont

arabic_text = reshaper.reshape(u'العربية')
arabic_text = get_display(arabic_text)
pdfmetrics.registerFont(TTFont('Arabic-bold', '/path-to-your-arabic-font'))

Then you have to setFont 'Arabic-bold' for displaying it in pdf file.

ReportLab: Arabic characters are displayed as black squares.

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