Chinese characters cannot rendered in PDF even if dedicated font command

[DrClairvoyant]

Hello, I met with some problems when exporting my script written in Chinese into PDF. I wrote the script entirely in Chinese, and the preview shows all the Chinese characters, but they just turned to blank when I exported a PDF copy.

I've looked into some other issue page and tried the Font: header command, and it works in the preview (all the characters in the preview mode are changed to the specified font), but the PDF only shows the non-Chinese characters in it, such as the numbers and alphabets.

I attached my original .fountain script file and the PDF copy of it below so you can have a check on it.

The issued PDF.pdf

Really hope that this bug could be fixed real soon 🙏🙏🙏

[piersdeseilligny]

Hi @DrClairvoyant Thanks for reporting this - could you just attach the .fountain document too (I think you forgot to attach it, there's only the PDF :p ) and i'il try and get it fixed asap

[DrClairvoyant]

Hi @piersdeseilligny I tried to submit the .fountain file together with the PDF, but it seems that GitHub doesn't support the upload of this kind of file. I will tried to find an alternative solution to it.

[DrClairvoyant]

https://1drv.ms/u/s!AoWOjyNwjo2Ag_1GXVc9hENLQjzagQ?e=9cQ71Q

I'm using OneDrive to share the .fountain file, see if you can download it 😉

[DrClairvoyant]

Btw I actually found a free fountain app called "Writer for Mac", which can actually export the non-latin characters in PDF successfully! Anyways I found an alternative for export, so I don't really need the internal export function for now, but good luck with the future developing and debugging! 😆 Hope you could really solve this problem in future 🙏

[piersdeseilligny]

So the issue is that most Chinese fonts are .ttc, rather than .ttf, which isn't a format supported by font-finder, the library I use to detect and index all the fonts on a machine. I've started working on adding ttc support to font-finder, but it might take a bit of time.

[piersdeseilligny]

I've submitted a pull request on the font-finder repo which adds support for Chinese fonts (and other TTC ones, such as Cambria). As soon as it's approved, i'il be able to publish a new version of betterfountain which will fix this issue!

If my PR isn't merged by the end of the month, I'il just include my fork of font-finder straight into betterfountain.

[piersdeseilligny]

So I've tried directly including the font-finder fork into betterfountain, but a bunch of ttc fonts are mysteriously incompatible with pdfkit for some reason... Additionally, the few that do work have a bunch of other issues, resulting from the fact that the characters are about double the width of most western fonts.

Unfortunately, I think this will have to go on the backburner. That said, I promise the next big rewrite of betterfountain (whenever that happens..) will be a lot more friendly to international alphabets. I really don't want it to be as western-centric as it currently is.