PDFKit broken when using Noto Sans font - node-pdfkit

Question

I'm trying to generate a pdf with Node.js using PDFKit. The pdf contains text in multiple languages, including arabic and russian, so I'm trying to use Noto Sans from Google, but as soon as I use that font, the layout is totally broken, not showing even latin characters:
var doc = new PDFDocument();
doc.registerFont('NotoSans', 'fonts/NotoSans-Regular.ttf');
doc.font('NotoSans');
doc.pipe(res);
doc.fontSize(15);
doc.text('UTF-8 Test');
doc.text('صباح الخیر');
doc.text('japanese');
doc.text('武大郎');
doc.text('RUSSIAN');
doc.text('Привет / здравствуйте');
doc.end();
But this is the result. I expected japanese not to work, but nothing gets displayed correctly. This is the output I get:
Using specific fonts for japanese and arabic works rendering that language, but I need a font that support multiple languages because I'm printing a dynamic table and I don't even know which languages are needed.

Answer 1

You're problem is that NotoSans-Regular.ttf doesn't have all the characters you're looking for. It only has Cyrillic, Greek, Latin characters:
Afrikaans, Aghem, Akan, Albanian, Asu, Azerbaijani, Bafia, Bambara,
Basaa, Basque, Belarusian, Bemba, Bena, Bosnian, Breton, Bulgarian,
Catalan, Central Atlas Tamazight, Chiga, Colognian, Cornish, Croatian,
Czech, Danish, Duala, Dutch, Embu, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Ewe,
Ewondo, Faroese, Filipino, Finnish, French, Friulian, Fulah, Galician,
Ganda, German, Greek, Gusii, Hausa, Hawaiian, Hungarian, Icelandic,
Igbo, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Jola-Fonyi, Kabuverdianu, Kabyle,
Kalaallisut, Kalenjin, Kamba, Kazakh, Kikuyu, Kinyarwanda, Koyra
Chiini, Koyraboro Senni, Kwasio, Kyrgyz, Langi, Latvian, Lingala,
Lithuanian, Luba-Katanga, Luo, Luyia, Macedonian, Machame,
Makhuwa-Meetto, Makonde, Malagasy, Malay, Maltese, Manx, Masai, Meru,
Mongolian, Morisyen, Mundang, Nama, North Ndebele, Northern Sami,
Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk, Nuer, Nyankole, Oromo, Polish,
Portuguese, Romanian, Rombo, Rundi, Russian, Rwa, Sakha, Samburu,
Sango, Sangu, Sena, Serbian, Shambala, Shona, Slovak, Slovenian, Soga,
Somali, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Swiss German, Taita, Tajik,
Tasawaq, Teso, Tongan, Turkish, Ukrainian, Uzbek, Vietnamese, Vunjo,
Walser, Welsh, Yangben, Yoruba, Zarma, Zulu
You need to load Noto-San in all the languages you're using.
Clone the nato into your project directory:
git clone git#github.com:googlei18n/noto-fonts.git
If you need Korean, Japanese, or Chinese clone these fonts as well:
git clone git#github.com:googlei18n/noto-cjk.git
Now that you have the fonts you want to use you need to register them
// Default
doc.registerFont('NotoSans', 'noto-ckj/hinted/Noto-Regular.ttf');
// Ariabic
doc.registerFont('NotoSansAR', 'noto-ckj/hinted/NotoKufiArabic-Regular.ttf');
// Chines, Korean, Japanese
doc.registerFont('NotoSansCKJ', 'noto-ckj/NotoSansCJK-Regular.ttc');
Once you've got the appropriate font's loaded then you can use them like so:
doc.font('NotoSans');
doc.text('English');
doc.font('NotoSansAR');
doc.text('العربية'); // Arabic
doc.font('NotoSansCKJ');
doc.text('日本語'); // Japanese
doc.text('武大郎'); // Chinese
doc.text('한국어'); // Korean
doc.font('NotoSans');
doc.text('русский'); // Russian
doc.text('ελληνικά'); // Greek
Be careful that you're not loading too many fonts into your PDF since they'll add to the overall size of you document. You may consider using a library like Franc to figure out which fonts you need before loading them.