FPDF utf-8 encoding HOW-TO

Question

Does anybody know how to set the encoding in FPDF package to utf-8  Or at least to ISO-8859-7  Greek  that support greek characters   Basically I want to create a pdf file containing greek characters   Any suggestions would help  George

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There is an extension of FPDF called mPDF that allows Unicode fonts   http   www mpdf1 com mpdf index php

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There also is a official UTF-8 Version of FPDF called tFPDF http   www fpdf org en script script92 php  You can easyly switch from the original FPDF  just make sure you also use a unicode Font as shown in the example in the above link or my code    lt  php    this is a UTF-8 file  we won t need any encode decode iconv workarounds    define the path to the  ttf files you want to use define  FPDF FONTPATH      fonts     require  tfpdf php      pdf   new tFPDF     pdf- gt AddPage        Add Unicode fonts   ttf files   fontName    Helvetica    pdf- gt AddFont  fontName     HelveticaNeue LightCond ttf  true    pdf- gt AddFont  fontName  B   HelveticaNeue MediumCond ttf  true      now use the Unicode font in bold  pdf- gt SetFont  fontName  B  12      anything else is identical to the old FPDF  just use Write   Cell   MultiCell         without any encoding trouble  pdf- gt Cell 100 20   Some UTF-8 String             gt    I think its much more elegant to use this instead of spaming utf8 decode   everywhere and the ability to use  ttf files directly in AddFont   is an upside too   Any other answer here is just a way to avoid or work around the problem  and avoiding UTF-8 is no real option for an up to date project   There are also alternatives like mPDF or TCPDF  and others  wich base on FPDF but offer advanced functions  have UTF-8 Support and can interpret HTML Code  limited of course as there is no direct way to convert HTML to PDF   Most of the FPDF code can be used directly in those librarys  so its pretty easy to migrate the code   https   github com mpdf mpdf http   www tcpdf org

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Don t use UTF-8 encoding  Standard FPDF fonts use ISO-8859-1 or Windows-1252  It is possible to perform a conversion to ISO-8859-1 with utf8 decode     str   utf8 decode  str   But some characters such as Euro won t be translated correctly  If the iconv extension is available  the right way to do it is the following   str   iconv  UTF-8    windows-1252    str

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This answer didn t work for me  I needed to run html decode on the string also   See  iconv  UTF-8    windows-1252   html entity decode  str      Props go to emfi from html entity decode in FPDF using tFPDF extention

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I know that this question is old but I think my answer would help those who haven t found solution in other answers  So  my problem was that I couldn t display croatian characters in my PDF  Firstly  I used FPDF but  I think  it does not support Unicode  Finally  what solved my problem is tFPDF which is the version of FPDF that supports Unicode  This is the example that worked for me   require  tFPDF tfpdf php     pdf   new tFPDF     pdf- gt AddPage     pdf- gt AddFont  DejaVu      DejaVuSansCondensed ttf  true    pdf- gt AddFont  DejaVu    B    DejaVuSansCondensed-Bold ttf   true     pdf- gt SetFont  DejaVu     14     txt    cc    dCC          pdf- gt Write 8  txt     pdf- gt Output

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There s an extention to FPDF called UFDPF http   acko net blog ufpdf-unicode-utf-8-extension-for-fpdf   But  imho  it s better to use mpdf if you re it s possible for you to change class

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I wanted to answer this for anyone who hasn t switched over to TFPDF for whatever reason  framework integration  etc    Go to  http   www fpdf org makefont index php  Use a  ttf compatible font for the language you want to use  Make sure to choose the encoding number that is correct for your language  Download the files and paste them in your current FPDF font directory   Use this to activate the new font    pdf- gt AddFont  font name     Your Font Here php     Then you can use  pdf- gt SetFont normally   On the font itself  use iconv to convert to UTF-8  So if for example you re using Hebrew  you would do iconv  UTF-8    windows-1255    first name     Substitute the windows encoding number for your language encoding   For right to left  a quick fix is doing something like strrev iconv  UTF-8    windows-1255    first name

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just edit the function cell in the fpdf php file  look for the line that looks like this  function cell   w   h   0   txt        border   0   ln   0   align        fill   false   link            after finding the line  write after the      txt   utf8 decode  txt     save the file and ready  the accents and the utf8 encoding will be working

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You can make a class to extend FPDF and add this   class utfFPDF extends FPDF    function Cell  w   h 0   txt      border 0   ln 0   align      fill false   link           if   empty  txt            if  mb detect encoding  txt   UTF-8   false                 txt   iconv  UTF-8    ISO-8859-5    txt                        parent  Cell  w   h   txt   border   ln   align   fill   link

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How do I create PDF s in FPDF that support Chinese  Japanese  Russian  etc       snapshots of code in use below   I d like to provide  a summary of the problem  the solution  a github project with the working code  and an online example with the expected  resultant PDF   The Problem      As stated by Tarsis  swap FPDF to TFPDF  You actually need a font that supports the UTF-8 characters you are using     I E   merely using Helvetica and trying to display Japanese will not work   If you use Font Forge  or some other font tool  you can scroll to the Chinese characters of the font  and see that they are blank   Google has a font  Noto font  that contains all languages  and it is 20mb  which is usually several factors the size of your text   So  you can see why many fonts simply won t cover every single language    The Solution    I m using rounded-mgenplus-20140828 ttf and ZCOOL QingKe HuangYou ttf font packs for Japanese and Chinese  which are open source and can be found in many open source projects   In tFPDF itself  or a new inheriting class of it  like class HTMLtoPDF extends tFPDF        you ll do this      this- gt AddFont  japanese        rounded-mgenplus-20140828 ttf   true    this- gt SetFont  japanese       14    this- gt Write 14            Should be nothing more to it   Code Package on GitHub    https   github com HoldOffHunger php-html-to-pdf  Working  Online Demo of Japanese    https   www earthfluent com privacy pdf language ja

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You need to generate a font first  You must use the MakeFont utility included within the FPDF package  I used on Linux this a bit extended script from the demo    lt  php    Generation of font definition file for tutorial 7 require     makefont makefont php      dir   opendir   usr share fonts truetype ttf-dejavu     while    relativeName   readdir  dir       false        if   relativeName             relativeName                 continue      MakeFont   usr share fonts truetype ttf-dejavu  relativeName   ISO-8859-2        gt    Then I copied generated files to the font directory of my web and used this    pdf- gt Cell 80 70  iconv  UTF-8    ISO-8859-2    Bunka jedna   1      I was working on a table   That worked for my language  Bunka jedna is czech for Cell one   Czech language belongs to central european languages  also ISO-8859-2  Regrettably the user of FPDF is forced to lost advantages of UTF-8 encoding  You cannot get this in your PDF   Mestecko Fruens B  ge   Danish letter    becomes r in ISO-8859-2   Suggestion of solution  You need to get a Greek font  generate the font using proper encoding  ISO-8859-7  and use iconv with the same target encoding as the one the font has been generated with

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For offsprings   How I managed to add russian language to fpdf on my Linux machine   1  Go to http   www fpdf org makefont  and convert your ttf font for example AerialRegular ttf  into 2 files using ISO-8859-5 encoding  AerialRegular php and AerialRegular z  2  Put these 2 files into fpdf font directory  3  Use it in your code    pdf   new  FPDI         pdf- gt AddFont  ArialMT      ArialRegular php         pdf- gt AddPage         tplIdx    pdf- gt importPage 1        pdf- gt useTemplate  tplIdx  0  0  211  297     width and height in mms      pdf- gt SetFont  ArialMT     35        pdf- gt SetTextColor 255 0 0        fullName   iconv  UTF-8    ISO-8859-5                    pdf- gt SetXY 60  54        pdf- gt Write 0   fullName

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there is a really simple solution for this problem   In the file fpdf php go to the line that says   if  txt           It is line 648 in my version of fpdf  Insert the following line of code    txt   iconv  utf-8    cp1252    txt      above the line of code   if  align   R     This works for all German special characters and should also work for Greek special characters  Otherwise simply replace cp1252 with the respective alphabet you require  You can see all supported characters here  http   en wikipedia org wiki Windows-1252  I saw the solution here  http   fudforum org forum index php t msg amp goto 167345 Please use my example code above  as the original author forgot to insert a dash between utf and 8   Hope the above was helpful   Daan

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I use FPDF for ASP  and the iconv function is not available  It seems strange  by I solved the UTF-8 problem by adding a fake image  an 1x1px jpeg  to the pdf  just after the AddPage   function   pdf Image  images fpdf jpg  0 0 1   In this way  accented characters are correctly added to my pdf  don t ask me why but it works

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You can apply this function on your text      yourtext   iconv  UTF-8    windows-1252    yourtext     Thanks

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Instead of this iconv solution    str   iconv  UTF-8    windows-1252    str     You could use the following    str   mb convert encoding  str   UTF-8    Windows-1252      See  How to convert Windows-1252 characters to values in php

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Not sure if it will do for Greek  but I had the same issue for Brazilian Portuguese characters and my solution was to use html entities  I had basically two cases    String may contain UTF-8 characters    For these  I first encoded it to html entities with htmlentities   and then decoded them to iso-8859-1  Example    s   html entity decode htmlentities  my variable text   ENT COMPAT   ENT HTML401   iso-8859-1       Fixed string with html entities    For these  I just left htmlentities   call out  Example    s   html entity decode  Treasurer Tr amp eacute sorier   ENT COMPAT   ENT HTML401   iso-8859-1      Then I passed  s to FPDF  like in this example    pdf- gt Cell 100  20   s  0  0   L      Note  ENT COMPAT   ENT HTML401 is the standard value for parameter  2  as in http   php net manual en function html-entity-decode php  Hope that helps

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None of the above solutions are going to work   Try this   function filter html  value        value   mb convert encoding  value   ISO-8859-1    UTF-8        return  value

[unicode] FPDF utf-8 encoding (HOW-TO)

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