Jivespace: Message List - View as PDF turns bullets into "???" (CS 2.5.3)

Re: View as PDF turns bullets into "???" (CS 2.5.3)

communities@jivesoftware.com — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 16:51:31 GMT

Thanks, that worked like a charm!

Re: View as PDF turns bullets into "???" (CS 2.5.3)

communities@jivesoftware.com — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 16:37:38 GMT

Hi Andy,

Although we had several things mis-configured, the fix for this was quite simple.

The default file encoding for our JVM (Sun 1.6) is not UTF-8. So, you need to specify this as a startup parameter for your servlet engine. We are using Tomcat 5.5, and it has an environment variable called JAVA_OPTS for adding additional JVM parameters. To fix this encoding problem add this parameter to your servlet engine startup script:

-Dfile.encoding=UTF-8

Then restart your servlet engine.

Doug

Re: View as PDF turns bullets into "???" (CS 2.5.3)

communities@jivesoftware.com — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 15:57:25 GMT

Jeff, could you elaborate on what you did to make this work? We're having the same problem and would like to know how to resolve it.

Thanks!

Andy

Re: View as PDF turns bullets into "???" (CS 2.5.3)

communities@jivesoftware.com — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 16:03:02 GMT

This is great to hear Jeff! Glad it's working as expected now.

~Long

Re: View as PDF turns bullets into "???" (CS 2.5.3)

communities@jivesoftware.com — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 02:20:09 GMT

Hi Long,

It seems some Apache fop font stuff may have been missing from our implementation. It is working fine now.

Thanks a million for all your help. As always!

Jeff

Re: View as PDF turns bullets into "???" (CS 2.5.3)

communities@jivesoftware.com — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 00:29:54 GMT

Hey Jeff,

I had a chance to discuss this with our resident PDF developer, and we weren't able to determine the root cause. The bullets appear to be standard HTML bullets, the only explaination would be that the font used in the PDF's doesn't have the bullet character. At the moment, I'm not sure how we could confirm this, I'm going to have to look through the code a bit more to verify exactly what's occurring during PDF generation.

We're not sure if this is necessary yet, but would it be possible to get a copy of your database & Tomcat deployment? Also which specific Linux flavor & version is this OS running on?

~Long

Re: View as PDF turns bullets into ??? (CS 2.5.3)

communities@jivesoftware.com — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 22:31:21 GMT

Hey guys,

We're still not sure what could be causing this, I cannot replicate this on my nearly identical setup. I've exhausted any potential root causes I could think of, I will need to discuss with one of our developers unfortunately he's not in the office today.

Thanks for your patience, I will try to have an update for you guys next monday.

~Long

Re: View as PDF turns bullets into ??? (CS 2.5.3)

communities@jivesoftware.com — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 19:42:26 GMT

Long,

I just changed our test server over to UTF-8 and it has no effect on this PDF encoding problem.

Anything else to try?

Thanks,

Doug

Re: View as PDF turns bullets into ??? (CS 2.5.3)

communities@jivesoftware.com — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 18:47:52 GMT

Hi Long,

We can't use UTF-8 right now, because it will break other websites on the same server. I'll try it on our development server.

We are Java 1.6.0_07-b06, running on Linux.

Thanks,

Doug

1.6.0_07-b06

Re: View as PDF turns bullets into ??? (CS 2.5.3)

communities@jivesoftware.com — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 18:42:33 GMT

Thanks,

I believe the Character Encoding should match at the Webserver and Database level, could you set the Webserver to UTF-8.

Which version of the Java JDK is MercyCorp using? 1.5 or 1.6?

~Long