Encoding of umlauts with the android pdf writer li

Question

I'm using the Android PDF Writer and I'm still confused. My PDF Renderer have to write words with umlauts ('ß', 'Ä', 'Ü') and they doesn't appear correctly in the pdf.

I think the issue is with the method getBytes(String encoding) from the String class.

PDFWriter pdfWriter = new PDFWriter(PaperSize.A4_WIDTH, PaperSize.A4_HEIGHT);
pdfWriter.setFont(StandardFonts.SUBTYPE, StandardFonts.SANS_SERIF, StandardFonts.MAC_ROMAN_ENCODING);
// only write some strings into the pdfwriter
parseData(pdfWriter);
outputToFile(filename, pdfWriter.asString(), "UTF-8");

When I inspect the pdfWriter.asString() the umlauts are present.

private void outputToFile(String fileName, String pdfContent, String encoding) {
    File newFile = new File(fileName);
    Log.v(Constants.LOG_TAG, newFile.getAbsolutePath());
    try {
        newFile.createNewFile();
        try {
            FileOutputStream pdfFile = new FileOutputStream(newFile);
            pdfFile.write(pdfContent.getBytes("UTF8"));
            pdfFile.close();
        } catch(FileNotFoundException e) {
            //
        }
    } catch(IOException e) {
        //
    }
}

Maybe there is a problem within the getBytes() method?

Answer 1

You have the answer before your very nose: Your PDF doesn't use UTF-8, so the PDF viewer tries to decode your UTF-8 encoded file as MacRoman.

For a quick fix you can use StandardEncodings.WIN_ANSI_ENCODING on one side and "WINDOWS-1252" or "ISO-8859-1" on the other.