Adding Unicode Support to pdf generation

The siwapp's pdf generator comes from the well known library called  dompdf. That library is not perfect, particularly regarding unicode character support.

That being said, all our slavic users have been suffering for this. The just can not get their characters right when generating pdf.

We're seriously thinking in changing pdf generator but, in the meantime, we've managed to sort this out for the development version. Any siwapp with a changeset number greater than 1716 should be able to generate pdfs with proper Cyrillic alphabet, to say the least.

Anyway, if you happen to have a siwapp whose version number is lower than 0.3.2, then your pdf generator doesn't have this feature enabled, so here are a couple of somehow messy instructions on how to achieve that. Really hope it helps.

• Create a new directory. It's going to be called "fonts" and it will be under the "data" directory of your siwapp directory tree. This directory is where your fonts will live.

  $ cd /wherever/your/siwapp/lives
  $ cd data
  $ mkdir fonts
  

• Download the fonts. Download them here (it's a zip file), uncompress them, and put them in the "fonts" directory you just created on previous step. You should have fonts archives with the following extensions per each font name:
  • .ttf
  • .afm
  • .ufm

And a file called dompdf_font_family_cache.dist

• Modify your apps/siwapp/config/siwappConfiguration.class.php. Locate these following lines:

    public function configure()
    {
      if(!defined("DOMPDF_FONT_CACHE"))
        define("DOMPDF_FONT_CACHE",
  	     sfConfig::get('sf_upload_dir').DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR.'pdf_fonts_cache');
  

  and replace them for:

    public function configure()
    {
      // enable utf support
      define("DOMPDF_UNICODE_ENABLED",true);
      define("DOMPDF_FONT_DIR",
             sfConfig::get('sf_data_dir').DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR.'fonts/');
      if(!defined("DOMPDF_FONT_CACHE"))
        define("DOMPDF_FONT_CACHE",
  	      sfConfig::get('sf_upload_dir').DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR.'pdf_fonts_cache');
  

  (you just added 4 lines)
• delete all files in your cache/ directory
• that should be all!