Reports do not recognise Arabic characters

Translation
1

Hello Gibbon community.
We have been using Gibbon for 6 months successfully, and we are very happy with the flexibility it provides.

I have just started looking in to the reporting module, specially after the upgrade to V 22

the issue i am facing is: all my data entries, student names, report name, reporting criteria … etc is in Arabic.

but when i generated the report, it was all in question marks, Arabic characters are not recognised.
how can i overcome that.
Thanks

Sample report to showcase the issue:

2

Hello Aziz,
Welcome to the Gibbon community. The issue is font. Which font you are using for reports. Set the font to DroidSansFallback explicitly in reports.

And let’s discuss if it persists.

Ghulam Abbas

3

Hello Ghulam, thanks for the reply.
i am actually using the default font DroidSansFallback, but this issue appears, i might try to upload another font that i am sure supports arabic and see what happens.

4

Try appending font face in css. If it’s not working then upload freeserif font

5

Hi again, i have uploaded a font, and used it in the template, yet the same issue.
not sure about editing the font face in css, how can i do that? please link me if any recourse already available.

6

Hi Aziz, uploading and adding a font to a template makes it available to the PDF renderer, but doesn’t specify which parts of the template should use that font. To do that, go into Template Builder > Mange Assets, duplicate one of your assets to test with, and edit it to add style=“font-family: yourfontname;”` to the outermost HTML tag (which should match the font file name in Manage Assets).

If you’re using the mPDF renderer for your templates, check out the list of compatible fonts, it looks like there is an Arabic option: https://mpdf.github.io/fonts-languages/available-fonts-v6.html You may also need to add direction: rtl;` inside the style tag: https://mpdf.github.io/fonts-languages/bidirectional-rtl-text-v6-x.html
7

Thanks Sandra, some how once i switched to mPDF renderer the text started working fine.
also i was able to change the text direction using a custom style sheet.
i still have some challenges but so far so good, thanks for the support.

8
Try appending font face in css. If it's not working then upload freeserif font

Hi, in which file should one change the font? I am having a similar issue with getting our system to generate Chinese characters.
Thanks in advance, Celliers

9

Hi Celliers, the PDF libraries use generic fonts that don’t support a full UTF8 set by default. I’ve updated the documentation about using custom fonts, which will require some tweaks to your CSS to apply the font-family declaration for your new font. Be sure to check out the instructions and let me know if it’s still not working: https://docs.gibbonedu.org/administrators/reports/templates/#using-custom-fonts