From: Xavier Noria <fxn@...>
Date: 2007-02-16T20:06:36+09:00
Subject: PDF::Writer and Unicode

According to the current manual PDF documents generated by  
PDF::Writer can use UTF-16BE, but after a few trials with iconv I  
can't get my UTF-8 strings right. Example:

   $KCODE = 'u'

   require 'rubygems'
   require 'pdf/writer'
   require 'iconv'

   str = Iconv.iconv('UTF-16BE', 'UTF-8', '� � �')
   pdf = PDF::Writer.new

   # renders � and � right, but not �
   pdf.text str

   # same output with garbage prepended
   pdf.text "\xfe\xff#{str}"
   pdf.save_as('unicode_test.pdf')

The manual does not document if any encoding is needed for  
select_font, I've played around with variations of

   # gives complete garbage
   pdf.select_font 'Times-Roman', :encoding => 'UTF-16BE'

without luck.

TextMate is generating UTF-8 source files for sure. Any ideas?

-- fxn