PDF Khmer Unicode Font Not Rendering Correctly

[sinsarath]

Hello everyone,

I'm using Eclipse BIRT Report Designer to generate reports in PDF format, but I’m facing issues with rendering Khmer Unicode Font. The Khmer characters either:

• Appear as blank or missing text, or
• Show incorrect khmer characters.

I've tested generating a simple PDF using OpenPDF with the Hanuman font. Here’s the code I used:

import com.lowagie.text.Document;
import com.lowagie.text.DocumentException;
import com.lowagie.text.Font;
import com.lowagie.text.Paragraph;
import com.lowagie.text.pdf.BaseFont;
import com.lowagie.text.pdf.PdfWriter;
import java.io.FileNotFoundException;
import java.io.FileOutputStream;
import java.io.IOException;

public class Main {
	public static void main(String[] args) throws DocumentException, IOException {
		// Output PDF file
        Document document = new Document();
        try {
			PdfWriter.getInstance(document, new FileOutputStream("Khmer_Font_Test.pdf"));
		} catch (DocumentException | FileNotFoundException e) {
			// TODO Auto-generated catch block
			e.printStackTrace();
		}
        document.open();
        // Load Hanuman TTF font
        BaseFont hanumanFont = BaseFont.createFont("/Users/sinsarath/eclipse-workspace/SamplePdf/fonts/Hanuman.ttf", BaseFont.IDENTITY_H, BaseFont.EMBEDDED);
        Font font = new Font(hanumanFont, 14); // Set font size to 14
        // Add Khmer text
        String khmerText = "លេខ";
        document.add(new Paragraph(khmerText, font));

        document.close();
        System.out.println("PDF generated successfully!");
	}
}

Result are render not correct:

It should be displayed like that: លេខ

[vk-github18]

See https://github.com/LibrePDF/OpenPDF/wiki/Accents,-DIN-91379,-non-Latin-scripts

[speckyspooky]

@vk-github18 Thanks for your hint, this was helpful for the original cause which was coming from the BIRT-project - discussion: eclipse-birt/birt#2040

Short additional hint to the reference, the layout-processor enabling LayoutProcessor.enableKernLiga(); must be done before the BaseFont is created to support advanced glyph handling.