On 1/3/07, Tobes <tobin / tobinharris.com> wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> I've been using Iconv with Ruby (OnRails) quite successfully for some
> time. We keep text as UTF-8 in our mysql database, and then convert it
> using Iconv to ISO-8859-1 when rendering PDF files in English, Danish,
> French or Dutch. Conversions work well, and RPDF outputs the converted
> text nicely.

First of all, I am curious. Why are you converting? If the text is already
in UTF-8 why is there a need to down-convert? I am not familiar enough
with the internals of PDF, but are there issues with using UTF-8 specifically
with PDF?

> However, we now want to output PDFs in ISO-8859-2. For some reason the
> output is garbled, see here:
>
> http://www.tobinharris.com/media/mtq38.jpg
>
> I just don't get it, can anyone see what might be happening? Is there a
> known issue with converting UTF-8 to 8859-2?

It looks like that PDF is 8859-1. It looks like it ignored your
request to translate
to Latin-2, or your PDF viewer is assuming that it is latin-1. The
Polish characters are mapped to various western european ones instead.
Double check that the characters
in your database were entered as UTF-8 (the Polish-specific characters will be 2
bytes not 1).