how can i export DataGridView with ARABIC data from Visual Basic to PDF by using iTextSharp [duplicate] - vb.net

Question

I have a problem with inserting UNICODE characters in a PDF file in eclipse.
There is some solution for this that it is not very efficient for me.
The solution is like this.
document.add(new Paragraph("Unicode: \u0418", new Font(bfComic, 12)));
I want to retrieve data from a database and show them to the user and my characters are in Arabic script and sometimes in Farsi script.
What solution do you suggest?
thanks

Answer 1

You are experiencing different problems:
Encoding of the data:
Please download chapter 2 of my book and go to section 2.2.2 entitled "The Phrase object: a List of Chunks with leading". In this section, look for the title "Database encoding versus the default CharSet used by the JVM".
You will see that database values are retrieved like this:
String name1 = new String(rs.getBytes("given_name"), "UTF-8");
That’s because the database contains different names with special characters. You risk that these special characters are displayed as gibberish if you would retrieve the field like this:
String name2 = rs.getString("given_name")
Encoding of the font:
You create your font like this:
Font font = new Font(bfComic, 12);
You don't show how you create bfComic, but I assume that this object is a BaseFont object using IDENTITY_H as encoding.
Writing from right to left / making ligatures
Although your code will work to show a single character, it won't work to show a sentence correctly.
Suppose that name1 is the Arabic version of the name "Lawrence of Arabia" and that we want to write this name to a PDF. This is done three times in the following screen shot:
The first line is wrong, because the characters are in the wrong order. They are written from left to right whereas they should be written from right to left. This is what will happen when you do:
document.add(name1);
Even if the encoding is correct, you're rendering the text incorrectly.
The second line is also wrong. The characters are now in the correct order, but no ligatures are made: ل followed by و should be combined into a single glyph: لو
You can only achieve this by adding the content to a ColumnText or PdfPCell object, and by setting the run direction to PdfWriter.RUN_DIRECTION_RTL. For instance:
pdfCell.setRunDirection(PdfWriter.RUN_DIRECTION_RTL);
Now the text will be rendered correctly.
This is explained in chapter 11 of my book. You can find a full example here: Ligatures2