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A
Anonymous
April 27, 2011
Question

Encoding Extended ASCII characters

  • April 27, 2011
  • 1 reply
  • 7420 views

I am trying to convert printed text reports to PDF and am running into an issue with the extended ASCII characters used to display boxes. Character 191(┐) is an upper right corner, 192(└) is a lower left corner, 196(─) is a vertical line etc . They are part the IBM Code Page 437 and the PC-* Symbol set.

In the PDF document, we are setting /BaseFont /Courier . I have tried different /Encoding lines - /Encoding WinAnsiEncoding for example, which will change the above characters to the appropriate character for that encoding. Is there an /Encoding option for code page 437 or PC-8? Is there a better way to go about this?

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    1 reply

    A
    Anonymous
    April 27, 2011

    Brian,

    Given the extent to which Unicode is used today, and its broad support in OSes and applications, you should instead be encoding these line-drawing characters according to Unicode. Character 91 corresponds to U+2510, Character 192 to U+2514, and Character 196 to U+2500 (although you described it as a vertical line, it displays as a horizontal line). Unicode is definitely the better way to go about this, and does not have the ambiguity that is present in most legacy encodings.

    A
    Anonymous
    April 27, 2011

    I tried adding /Encoding UnicodeEncoding and that did not do the trick. It also killed the Courier font which we need becuase of the proportional spacing.

    Instead of an actual charater 196 in the data stream,  I tried adding  U+2500 but that did not work either.

    How do you encode these as unicode characters in the data stream?

    A
    Anonymous
    April 27, 2011

    Brian,

    Although I would love to be able to provide to you the guidance that you need, the details are beyond my area of expertise. You are likely to get the guidance that you need by posing these questions in the appropriate Adobe Forum, specifically the Acrobat SDK one.

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