Indian language file - pdf problem

Question

I work mostly with Indian langauges fonts and have ttf (and some ATM) fonts.
When I try to make pdf for printing purposes, some characters do not appear in pdf. I found from the character map that they are equivalent to "no-break space" character. And in some languages (fonts), the same character appears perfectly.
I use acrobat distiller to make pdf for prepress. (It is another problem that sometimes such characters do not appear even in normal word file.)
Is there any solution to solve this problem, because, this problem appears in almost all Indian fonts.
Interestingly, a pdf can be prepared from the same file with the Windows98 version.
I have posted the same question (shorter one) at pdf forum as well.
Can anyone help?

Answer 1

We experienced the exact same problem as the OP (including corrupt files named "f.pdf" and the browser dialog box he documented). Don't know if his environment is similar, but here is how we fixed our issue:
Our app uses an Authentication Scheme that includes under "Page Session Management" a "Session Verify Function" called like this: "return timeout_pkg.check_timeout;". This timeout_pkg I think came from code originally posted here, it works well so thanks to the original coder. However it does present a small issue in that it rewrites the mime headers in the server response in one use case. Since it is rewriting the headers to "text/html" even though we are sending back a report where the mime header should be "application/pdf", the client gets confused and the result is the symptoms the OP posted.
So if we change the timeout package and body so the signature is like this: "function check_timeout (p_request IN VARCHAR2 DEFAULT null) return boolean;"
And change the call in the "Session Verify Function" to pass the request as a parameter like: "return timeout_pkg.check_timeout(:REQUEST);"
And change the body of the timeout_pkg.check_timeout function to use the correct mime type when calling a report:
elsif not g_cookie_already_sent then
if (p_request is not null and INSTR(p_request, 'PRINT_REPORT') != 0) then
owa_util.mime_header('application/pdf', FALSE);
else
     owa_util.mime_header('text/html', FALSE);
     end if;
then we solve our particular problem... I hope this saves somebody else some time, remember this was our specific solution to the exact symptoms documented by the OP, however as a general rule I would say if you are experiencing problems with pdf printing from Apex, watch out for anything your app might be doing with the owa_util pkg in particular and mime headers in the server response in general.
Edited by: cmcneil on Sep 5, 2008 11:45 AM
Edited by: cmcneil on Sep 5, 2008 11:59 AM