[xep-support] Problems embedding a Font into PDF depending on the charmap

Dear XEP support team,

we are using XEP to render PDF files from DocBook-XML sources. So far,
we have been content with the results generated. Last week, we moved to
a newer server machine and here problems occured with the generated PDF
files:
Acrobat was not able to extract an embedded font from the PDF file and fell
back
to standard fonts, other PDF viewers partly showed only blank space where
the
letters were supposed to be.
To find the cause I've tried to set up the same environment on the new
machine
as on the old system. Eventually, when I prefixed the XEP command by a
"env LC_CTYPE=en_US" PDFs were produced the way we want it with embedded
fonts. A "locale charmap" prefixed by "env LC_CTYPE=en_US" returns me
ISO-8859-1,
otherwise I get UTF-8!
Now my questions:

How does the set charmap influence the embedding of fonts in PDF files to
be generated
by XEP? Why do I have to run XEP with the charmap set to ISO-8859-1?

I have extracted the strings from both PDF files (running XEP with
ISO-8859-1 charmap and
with UTF-8 charmap) and find differences like this one here (diff -y
output):

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
662 0 obj (
<</Type/FontDescriptor (
/FontName /GFEDCB+IBM-BodoniBELight-Oblique (
/Ascent 706 (
/Descent -289 (
/CapHeight 706 (
/Flags 32 (
/FontBBox [-188 -293 1164 924] (
/ItalicAngle 0 (
/StemV 100 (
/StemH 50 (
/XHeight 412 (
/FontFile 664 0 R (
endobj (
664 0 obj (
<</Length 665 0 R (
/Length1 666 0 R (
/Filter /FlateDecode (
/Length2 667 0 R (
/Length3 668 0 R (
stream (
> }#~E
> pGg(
> 0HZT\ZL
> *&,&
> 6(@X
> 1jp7(D
> pk;$
> NXXB
> ibMP
> FFfyG
> s /dK
> RB'Md
> [s58
> FAFs
> ifoq
> M ^g
> %Agc
> /hw[
> VL$_
> hAO/%
> l<cF
> j0huO
> frn7>_0Ys
> }4<>
> Y1(te
> NWb<
> 68RH.
> o}G[
> !m]6A^pE
> ?ZhpY
> f'aN
> _Twss
> ~tRG
> jM)
> ,[l'n
> [k :
> wKtc;
> zX<\
> 3a#T
> }/u~
> Wo=
> *Ey.\+
> h[qBHT
> Y$M4
> >*mO
> ;=n[p
> DVGx
> v[;_
> O<pgb
> Msff|2
> ~Zuu}6b
> =sq}
> zf/6N*
> vnE`L9ft
> qKgR
> T0Kr
> mO3{
> \eND
endstream (
endobj (
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The left side is the broken PDF (generated with UTF-8 charmap set) and the
right side shows
the lines that are included in the working PDF (generated with ISO-8859-1
charmap) and as
it seems are missing in the broken one (for me it looks like the
Font-Data).

Oh, before I forget that: When run with UTF-8 charmap I get messages like
this:

[error] java.lang.NumberFormatException: For input string: ""

Anybody has an idea what this can be, running with charmap ISO-8859-1 (so
the working
"run") I don't see those lines in the output. We use IBM-Java 1.4.2, if you
suspect the
Java runtime to be the problem I can also try it on other run times.

Thanks in advance for any help, with kind regards

Carsten Jacobi

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Received on Wed Nov 2 03:30:18 2005