Reporting can't render Chinese characters in on Elastic Cloud

[marius-dr]

Kibana version: 7.5.0 (I assume it happens earlier as well)

Describe the bug: If you have any chinese characters in your report, you won't be able to see them in the generated PDF/PNG. This can be solved by the user when it's the case of self-hosted, but there's no option for that in Cloud.

We need to add a few fonts to the docker image (that is used by Cloud) in order support at least the languages that Kibana is translated into: ja-JP, zh-CN for now.
You don't even need to have data with chinese characters, because if the UI is set to these languages, some of the text will be in that language in the PDF (for example: "Count" on a line chart).

Steps to reproduce:

1. Set your Kibana to zh-CN as locale.
2. Create a simple histogram with Count on x-axis and generate a PDF report on it.
3. The label on the x-axis will be empty boxes.

Expected behavior:
We should at least support the languages that we offer translations for the UI.

Screenshots (if relevant):

@elastic/kibana-reporting-services
@elastic/kibana-operations (for the build process of the docker images)
@vogxn (for visibility in this issue that happens in Cloud)

[jbudz]

reporting-services, any ideas if chromium can include more font packs in the build or referenced as static assets (as opposed to global fonts?) we can bake these into the image but this would be more comprehensive if we bundled it

[kunisen]

Any updates for this ticket please?
This not only happens to Elastic cloud but also happens in ECE.
As suggested by @jbudz,

any ideas if chromium can include more font packs in the build or referenced as static assets (as opposed to global fonts?)

Also, it would be the best that the "more font packs" can cover necessary CJK (Chinese-Japanese-Korean) fonts.

[eedugon]

Same issue occurring also with Elasticsearch 7.7.0 in Elastic Cloud. Actually it's a bit weird, because creating a dashboard with a simple visualization as showed by @marius-dr (which I have reproduced in 7.5.0), creates a PDF like this:

which is apparently empty (but we can see also how some fonts are missing too).

[tsullivan]

Hi team, it doesn't look like font packages can be bundled or embedded into the Chromium build. If that's possible, there would be a lot of benefits to it, so we will keep that idea on the board of ways to improve Reporting.

The standing guidance from Reporting team is as the documentation suggests: font packages are external dependencies that have to be separately installed on the system for Chromium to utilize it.

I will reach out to the Cloud team to have this tracked as a Cloud Kibana issue, and will make sure all the necessary font packages are getting installed.

Update: There is an effort in Cloud to use the stack image instead of a custom one, as they currently do. Therefore, this issue: #70889 is the one to track about providing full language support for Reporting in Cloud.

[tylersmalley]

Fixed by #74806

[elasticmachine]

Pinging @elastic/kibana-core (Team:Core)