Question

What I need

Special characters to work on FPDF, either working with hardcoded strings or results from a DB query

What I’m using

As suggested in some questions here at SO, I’m using tFPDF to get special-characters to work.

Problem

It works on the strings that are retrieved from an MySQL database but not on my hardcoded strings.

Inputs Example

DB string:

Hardcoded equivalent:
Operação

Outputs Example

As you can see, the filled cell is the hardcoded one, and the non-filled is the result from the DB.

Code

For hardcode output of table header cell, i’m using the following code:

$pdf->Cell($wO,$h,'Operação',1,0,'C',true);

To output the DB result, I’m using a similar code:

$pdf->Cell($wO,$h,$oper,1,0,'C',$fill);

I already tried utf8_encode but it only gives me rectangles instead of the characters…

Answer 1

I solved this by using Arial font on the table headers and print the cell like this so that it assumes the special character:

$pdf->Cell($wO,$h,'Opera'.chr(231).chr(227).'o',1,0,'C',true);

Then, I put the special font named DejaVu again so that it places the special characters on the DB results.
Hope it helps anyone with the same problem, I followed this example and got the char number…