Errors with Japanese text and currency

subtotal_user

Hi! When creating an invoice with JPY, the currency indicator is not shown in the PDF, and Japanese text on the invoice is replaced by whitespace. This seems to happen regardless of PDF layout and font chosen. See the attached screenshot for proof of missing currency indicator and whitespace that is visible instead of Japanese text. If possible, please look after this, as we cannot use your otherwise very nice application. Thank you. 🙂

subtotal_user

(Addendum: Switching the PDF layout to Japanese leads to no Japanese text being displayed at all. Also, using an uploaded font that contains Japanese glyphs does not change anything.)

timo

Thanks for reporting this.

I found two separate issues here:

The JPY currency symbol used by SubTotal was the full-width yen character (￥). Some bundled PDF fonts do not support that glyph, so I changed it to the standard yen symbol (¥). This should fix the missing currency symbol.
The bundled PDF fonts currently do not include Japanese glyphs. Because of that, Japanese invoice text or Japanese layout labels may disappear in exported PDFs unless a Japanese-capable custom font is used.

SubTotal already supports custom PDF fonts in “My company”, so uploading a compatible TTF font there, e.g. Noto Sans JP, should solve the Japanese text rendering issue without increasing the app size for all users.

I also added a warning for future versions when the PDF contains characters that the bundled fonts may not support.