RE: [docbook-apps] Using Japanese in FOP

["Dick Hamilton" <rlhamilton@frii.com>]

George,

I've been able to generate a Japanese PDF using FOP.  I've
only done this for a few short files just to prove it could
be done, but it seems to work ok.

At a high level, what I did was to create font metrics for the
MS Gothic font, which is a unicode font, link things up so that
fop can access the font and its metrics, then use a file with
UTF-8 encoding.  I don't know how to print Japanese directly
from Shift-JIS, but it's pretty easy to get utf-8 from Shift-JIS.

Here is the environment I used:

- fop 0.93
- Saxon 6.5.3
- MS Gothic font (C:\WINDOWS\Fonts\MSGOTHIC.TTC on XP systems)
- OS is irrelevant as far as I can tell, but beware that MS Gothic
  may be legally restricted to Windows, so if you use another OS,
  you may want to check out a unicode font page like http://wazu.jp,
  which lists a bunch of choices, some open source, some not.

Here are the steps:

- Follow the instructions on the following page for getting
  a font metrics file from MSGOTHIC.TTC:

  http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/0.93/fonts.html

  MSGOTHIC.TTC is a font collection file with three font
  I used MS Gothic and haven't tried the others.

- This step will yield an xml file that I'll call MSGothic.xml.

- Put this file somewhere convenient; in this example it's in
  C:\myfonts\MSGothic.xml.

- Edit your fop.conf file to include a reference to the metrics
  file and font file.  E.g.,

  <font metrics-url="file:///C:/myfonts/MSGothic.xml" kerning="yes"
      embed-url="file:///C:/WINDOWS/Fonts/MSGOTHIC.TTC">
    <font-triplet name="MSGothic" style="normal" weight="normal"/>
    <font-triplet name="MSGothic" style="normal" weight="bold"/>
  </font>

- Specify the font MSGothic in your XSL customization layer.  Here
  is a stripped down stylesheet that just imports the standard and
  sets the body and title font families.

  <xsl:stylesheet
    xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform";
    xmlns:fo="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Format";
    version="1.0">
    <xsl:import href="/path-to-styles/1.72.0/fo/docbook.xsl"/>
    <xsl:param name="body.font.family">MSGothic</xsl:param>
    <xsl:param name="title.font.family">MSGothic</xsl:param>
  </xsl:stylesheet>

- Convert the content from Shift-JIS to UTF8.  I use iconv on
  Linux to do this; I don't know if there's an equivalent on
  Windows.

- Run the transforms using the customization layer that specifies
  the font, then run fop using the fop.conf file that contains the
  code described above.

That should do the trick.  There may be other gotchas with larger
examples, but I hope this gets you headed in the right direction.

Dick Hamilton
rlhamilton@frii.com



-----Original Message-----
From: Eckel, George [mailto:geckel@amazon.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, May 16, 2007 1:57 AM
To: docbook-apps@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: [docbook-apps] Using Japanese in FOP


I have a docbook book that has been translated into Japanese. FOP will
not produce a PDF. Seems like encoding="Shift_JIS" would do the trick
but no. I've fiddled with a lot of other changes without success.
Has anyone made docbook files in Japanese go through FOP? If so, can you
please send me either an example file or the steps you took to make FOP
work with the JP character set?
Thanks, 
George.. 
Amazon, Inc.