Using PDFBox to write unicode strings to a PDF

Question

I want to use Apache PDFBox 1.8.8 to create a PDF that contains unicode characters but I\'m confused about what is supported and what isn\'t.

An answer posted here s

Answer 1

Essentially all the answers you linked to are correct. You have to keep in mind which PDFBox version they respectively refer to.

concerning this answer:

In the pre-2.0.0 versions (up to the current 1.8.8) the text drawing operations were very limited and didn't support even the full WinAnsi encoding which font objects generated by these versions used as encoding.

concerning this answer:

The current 2.0.0-SNAPSHOT development state has much improved. This means that the limitations of the text drawing operations have been removed, they properly encode the text and the used fonts are properly encoded and embedded. Bugs in the early implementations of these improvements meanwhile have mostly been fixed.

concerning this answer:

This answer points to something one needs to keep in mind, no matter which PDFBox version one uses: specific fonts do not necessarily support the whole Unicode range of code points. If the font you use does not contain a glyph definition for a character, you can encode as much as you want, your character won't be drawn properly. This especially concerns the standard 14 fonts which every PDF viewer has to support: they need only support characters from a few Latin-style encodings, by far not the the full Unicode set.