UTF-16-Support/Emoji Support

[glauberramos]

Not sure if I'm doing something wrong, but I can't display emojis inside the PDF.

Are you using the latest version of jsPDF?
Version 1.4.1

Steps to reproduce
pdf.text('😍 😎 😘 😐', 10 ,10)
https://jsbin.com/sohijak/2/edit?html,js,output

What I saw

What I expected
😍 😎 😘 😐

[Uzlopak]

According to the PDF reference(PDF 32000-1:2008 7.9.2) PDF viewer display text with ASCII/ANSI-codepage and not with Unicode. Unicode-characters use two bytes per character instead of one byte per character like in ASCII/ANSI. This forces the PDF viewers to interpret Unicode-encoded text as ASCII/ANSII-encoded text and that resulting into displaying "strange" characters.

To display Unicode-encoded text you have to add your own font to your custom-tailored PDF. jsPDF supports TTF, which have to be converted to base64-encoded strings. Precheck if your desired font supports the characters you want to use. There is no use for example in using a font lacking of arabic characters and hoping that the generated PDF will display arabic characters.

In the jsPDF-project we have a fontconverter, which you can find in the folder "fontconverter". This simple tool lets you "convert" a ttf to jsPDF needed format. It also adds necessary operations to add the font to the jsPDF runtime. You have to include the resulting javascript-file to your project and you are ready to use it for your pdf.

You have to set the font as usual with setFont and jsPDF will render your text correct.

[glauberramos]

I tried to use OpenSans font with the fontconverter and it is not working. Do you have a working example that I can use @arasabbasi ? I just need any font actually that supports emoji.

[Uzlopak]

I checked it. The emojis are UTF-16 and not UTF-8. So we dont support these symbols. Dont know how to solve this.

[github-actions]

This issue is stale because it has been open 90 days with no activity. It will be closed soon. Please comment/reopen if this issue is still relevant.

[sorensenjs]

Although this bug was originally written discussing emoji in the Supplementary Multilingual Plane, and that does pose unique challenges as these symbols require two UTF-16 values (a surrogate pair) to represent them (https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/plane/U+10000).

However, jsPDF also fails to render emoji in the BMP, simple cases like ☺ which are represented with a single UTF-16 word, no different from the arabic text which is handled specially.
https://jsbin.com/boxugid/edit?html,js,output

In the case of U+263a it looks like it's simply interpreting this UTF-16 sequence as a pair of bytes and outputting the ascii characters U+0026 (&) and U+003a (:).