Exporting Vietnamese Characters to PDF

If you have Vietnamese characters in your report and notice that on a PDF export the special characters are either left out completely or replaced with '?', then the following steps will show you how to create a font extension to properly export those special characters. Note that this may work for other special characters in other languages.

Creating the Font Extension with Jaspersoft Studio

1. Go to Window -> Preferences -> Jaspersoft Studio -> Fonts and click the Add button.
2. Type in your Font Family name and select your font file for Normal, Bold, Italic, and Bold Italic. Note that you do not have to supply a font file for Bold, Italic, and Bold Italic if you do not plan on using these styles.
3. Select 'Identity-H (Unicode with horizontal writing)' for the PDF Encoding and also check the box for 'Embed this font in PDF document'. This is a predefined encoding for rendering large fonts or fonts with non-standard glyphs. This is the key step for exporting special characters to PDF.
4. Press Next. The font mapping is an optional step.
5. Press Next. The locales is an optional step.
6. Press Finish. Your font extension is now available for use in Jaspersoft Studio.

You can now press the Export button to export a JAR file for use with JasperReports Server. This JAR will need to go in the <jasperserver-pro>/WEB-INF/lib folder. A server restart is required to load this extension.

Now that your font extension is available in Jaspersoft Studio. You can select it from the list of fonts when editing a text element in the report.