cfdocument not showing Chinese character

Question

We have a system that uses a mixture of English and
Simplified Chinese on almost every page. After properly installing
the Simplified Chinese fonts (gb2312) on all of the users
PC’s via the Regional and Language setting, the pages display
both languages properly.
We have just started using the <cfdocument> to create
PDF documents. We were eager to convert to <cfdocument> in
order to be able to use CSS and to be able to display the Chinese
characters in the PDF document as they are displayed in the HTML.
We tried it first on a CF MX 7 test bed. Once we created the
cffont.properties.cn in the cf_root/Lib directory, it worked like a
champ.
In order get this feature into production, we moved the .cfm
files and the cffont.properties files from out CF 7 test bed to our
CF8 development system. No matter what we do, all we see in the PDF
file where the Chinese characters should be are “?”.
We can’t find any information on anything else that we
need to do to make the Chinese characters appear besides creating
the cffont.properties files in the cf_root/Lib directory as we did
in CF 7. Using the CF Administrator’s Font Manager, I can see
that the required Simplified Chinese fonts (NSimSun, SimSun &
Simhei) are installed on the server. The bare bones code seems
simple enough:
<cfdocument format=“pdf”
fontembed=”selective”>
Page text…
</cfdocument.
If you have done this, or know what we need to do to port
form CF7 to CF8, I would appreciate your sharing.
Thank you in advance for your help.
Len

Answer 1

I see what you are saying about utf-8. I put in a
cfprocessingdirective tag in order to use utf-8 encoding, but it
makes no apparent difference. I also tried using other canonical
values (MS936, x-mswin-936, etc.) for Simplified Chinese that I
found in a Java spec on the Sun website – still not
difference. Well that’s not strictly true: when I used Cp935,
it turned everything to Chinese characters.
After working with the utr-8 and doing some other analysis we
discovered the questions marks in the code were not being cause by
unprintable characters, but they we actually in the data. OOOOPs.
This is a whole new ballgame. At first we though that the
servers running CF8 must be missing some font that was needed on
the server side. We brought over all of the fonts that seemed to be
associated with Simplified Chinese, but that didn’t make any
difference. I one final act of desperation, we changed the format
on the cfdocument from PDF to SWF. All of the Chinese characters
appeared in the SWF output file. All of the Chinese characters also
appear in the HTML output that is generated at the same time that
the PDF/SWF files are created. I call the code that creates the
actual report twice from within a shell: once inside the cfdoument
with a file name to create a separate file, and once that is not
within it to create a HTML presentaion.
The same code, when run on a CF7 server, produces a PDF
output with all of the Chinese characters. One last thing, we are
using CF8 on two different servers: one running W2KS and the other
with W2003S.
The only thing I can conclude from all of this is that there
is either something wrong with the CF8 setup on both servers, or
there is something wrong with CF8 itself.
I'm also in the middle of a severe Verity problem that I'm
working on with Adobe. The K2Server.exe process will crash (process
grows from about 15k to over 700,000k) after doing some number of
Verity collection creations or in the indexing. I've sent them code
that will create this problem time after time. They are still
scratching their collective heads over this one. I see it as a
classic case of memory leakage. They haven't agreed with me yet.
Having said all that, it seems entirely possible that there is some
undiscovered problem with cfdocument and PDF file creation using
CF8 as well.
Len