Question

I am trying to display Chinese characters using reportlab pisa. The generated Chinese words become black blocks. I am using UTF-8 to generate the PDFs

def render_to_pdf(template_src, context_dict):
    """Function to render html template into a pdf file"""
    template = get_template(template_src)
    context = Context(context_dict)
    html  = template.render(context)
    result = StringIO.StringIO()

    pdf = pisa.pisaDocument(StringIO.StringIO(html.encode("UTF-8")), result)
    if not pdf.err:
        return HttpResponse(result.getvalue(), mimetype='application/pdf')
    return HttpResponse('We had some errors<pre>%s</pre>' % escape(html))

Answer 1

This is a font problem, as whatever font you need to display is not embeddable by reportlabs in the pdf.

Suggest you check the reportlabs ftp server for the font packages you need.