[...]Working with UTF-8 in PDF::Writer and Ruby on Rails – Peter Krantz[...]…

module PDF
class Writer
alias_method :old_add_text, :add_text

def add_text(x,y,textto,size,angle,word_space_adjust)
old_add_text(x,y,CONVERTER.iconv(textto), size,angle,word_space_adjust)
end

end
end

How is this a solution to working with UTF-8 in PDF::Writer and Rails?

It’s a way of *not* working with UTF-8 in PDF::Writer and Rails.

No solution, I’m re-writing using prawn. The folks around it’s google group are wonderfully helpful, and I look forward to an easier syntax. Cheers

I tried adding this to the solution here (http://pastie.org/252651) but it looks like the pdf is still rendering latin characters with the 254 and 255 bytes being rendered and prepended to everything.

Please post if you get this working! Another alternative is to move over to prawn, which appears to support UTF-8 out of the box.

Currently in PDF::Writer:
Iconv.conv(‘utf-16BE’, ‘utf-8′, ‘ローラー’) ==> 0í0ü0é0ü

While irb:
Iconv.conv(‘utf-16BE’, ‘utf-8′, ‘ローラー’) ==> “0\3550\3740\3510\374″

alias_method :old_add_text, :add_text unless method_defined?(:old_add_text)

This prevents the method to be overridden more often than once.

Cheers,
boris

stack level too deep

?

does not work with Time objects. The trick is to call iconv with text.to_s instead of just text. Then you are able to print dates (for example to put Time.now in the page footer).