38 Building a Report with Multibyte Characters for PDF Output

In this chapter, you will learn about reports that include multibyte characters. By following the steps in this chapter, you can generate the PDF report output shown in Figure 38-1 and Figure 38-2.

Figure 38-1 Output of the multibyte character set UTF8 report in Japanese

Description of Figure 38-1 follows
Description of ''Figure 38-1 Output of the multibyte character set UTF8 report in Japanese''

Figure 38-2 Output of the same multibyte character set UTF8 report in Polish

Description of Figure 38-2 follows
Description of ''Figure 38-2 Output of the same multibyte character set UTF8 report in Polish''

Concepts

  • With multibyte character support built into Oracle Reports, you can publish reports in any language for your global enterprise. You can produce reports that display text in multibyte character sets, such as Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Unicode.

  • Oracle Reports supports multibyte characters in various output formats, including PDF. In this chapter, you will build a multibyte character set report using the UTF8 character set to generate PDF output.

  • You can generate a portable PDF file using Oracle Reports. The PDF features, such as font subsetting and embedding, enable you to generate PDF files that can be viewed on an end user's computer without having special fonts installed.

    Note:

    You must have Acrobat Reader installed on your computer to view PDF output.

  • When you use PDF font embedding, you include the entire font set in the PDF file.

  • PDF font embedding in Oracle Reports is for single-byte Type1 fonts and not for TrueType fonts. Therefore, if you want to include specific TrueType fonts in your report, you must first convert these fonts to Type1 fonts using any of the available third party tools.

    Tip:

    Make sure that you have the necessary licenses for the fonts before embedding them in your output PDF file.

  • Although PDF font subsetting and font embedding are mutually exclusive, PDF font subsetting is a variant of PDF font embedding. PDF font subsetting is the preferred method of creating multibyte reports because it works for both single and multibyte fonts.

  • With the font subsetting, the PDF output file contains information of only those characters that appear in the document. Therefore, this feature produces more efficient output in terms of file size. Both font embedding and subsetting eliminate the dependency of installing specific fonts on your computer.

Note:

See the "Using PDF in Oracle Reports" chapter in Publishing Reports to the Web with Oracle Reports Services.

Example Scenario

In this example, you have an international business with offices in the United States, Japan, and Poland. In the organization, local managers have control of the inventory of the warehouses. Offices in different locations want to print the list of products in their preferred language. You will create a report in PDF format that contains multibyte characters for the Web and paper output.

As you build this example report, you will:

To see a sample multibyte character set report, open the examples folder named multibyte, then open the Oracle Reports example named multibyte_utf8.rdf. For details on how to open it, see "Accessing the Example Reports" in the Preface.