PDF printing German umlauts

Question

Hello all,
I'm trying to use the new "Report Query" and "Report Layout" feature. First of all I have to say that my PDF printing setup works generally. My problem has nothing to do with that. Here's what I'm trying to do and what my problem is:
I'm using a report query on a table which has data with german umlauts (äöüÄÖÜ) and special characters (ß) in it. Trying to print that report with the standard layout works. I see my german nls characters. If I try to apply a XSL-FO stylesheet I get # signs for my german nls characters. I played with the encoding of my stylesheet but that has no effect. TRANSLATE ... USING or CONVERT hasn't any effect either. I also changed the PlsqlNLSLanguage setting in my dads.conf to GERMAN_GERMANY, but that also has no effect. Now I'm pretty lost.
Anybody out there has some tips on using german special characters in report queries with own written XSL-FO stylesheets ?
Regards Markus

Answer 1

Hi Jes,
this is the query:
select name, title, original_title,
to_char ( purchase_date, 'dd.mm.yyyy' ) as purchase_date,
to_char ( price, '990D00' ) as price,
currency
from authors a,
books b
where a.id = b.author_id
order by nlssort ( name, 'nls_sort = generic_m' ),
nlssort ( title, 'nls_sort = generic_m' )
here's an excerpt from the XML:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
- <ROWSET>
- <ROW>
<NAME>Buchheim, Lothar Günter</NAME>
<TITLE>Das Boot</TITLE>
<ORIGINAL_TITLE />
<PURCHASE_DATE>21.05.1997</PURCHASE_DATE>
<PRICE>0.00</PRICE>
<CURRENCY>DM</CURRENCY>
</ROW>
- <ROW>
<NAME>Stroustrup, Bjarne</NAME>
<TITLE>The C Programming Language</TITLE>
<ORIGINAL_TITLE />
<PURCHASE_DATE>21.05.1997</PURCHASE_DATE>
<PRICE>0.00</PRICE>
<CURRENCY>DM</CURRENCY>
</ROW>
</ROWSET>
as you can see the umlauts (ü) are there but the + signs are missing. The XSL-FO is indeed too big to post here. If you give me your email address, I'll mail it in zip format to you.
Regards Markus