Cyrillic letters showing while PDF creation via iText

Question

I have HTML page with Cyrillic letters and I use iText library for conversion from HTML to PDF. I don't use iText directly and use XMLWorkerHelper for doing conversion:

OutputStream file = new FileOutputStream(outputFile);
Document document = new Document();
PdfWriter writer = PdfWriter.getInstance(document, file);
document.open();
InputStream is = new ByteArrayInputStream(htmlContentString.getBytes());
XMLWorkerHelper.getInstance().parseXHtml(writer, document, is);
document.close();
writer.close();
file.close();

Unfortunately, I can't see Cyrillic letters in output PDF file at all.

How can I prepare source HTML file (some font tags, CSS attributes etc.) for getting PDF output properly?

Possible duplicate of [html to pdf convert, cyrillic characters not displayed properly](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/30889217/html-to-pdf-convert-cyrillic-characters-not-displayed-properly) — Alexey Subach, Jul 08 '16 at 20:48

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 11 '16 at 23:36

The reason of the problem is iText internally uses a font without Cyrillic letters for PDF rendering.

So the solution is defining a font with Cyrillic letters for any PDF elements (e.g. default Windows Arial font). It's possible to do via specifying CSS file in parseXHtml call as a parameter:

...
XMLWorkerHelper.getInstance().parseXHtml(writer, document, is, getStylesStream());
...
private InputStream getStylesStream() {
    return PdfReport.class.getResourceAsStream("/reports/styles.css");
}

and in styles.css should be

* {
    /* Enforces to use font with Cyrillic letters */
    font-family: Arial;
}

However, this approach looses any default iText styling. So I copied in my styles.css all content of default.css file from xmlworker.jar.

Unfortunately, ability to change content of default.css after its loading in memory (via XMLWorkerHelper.getInstance().getDefaultCSS()) is prohibited.

Cyrillic letters showing while PDF creation via iText

1 Answers1