How to generate PDF in Hebrew? currently the PDF is generated empty - itext

Question

I'm using iTextSharp 5.5.13 and when i try to generate the PDF with Hebrew it comes out empty.
this is my code: I'm i doing something wrong?
public byte[] GenerateIvhunPdf(FinalIvhunSolution ivhun)
{
byte[] pdfBytes;
using (var mem = new MemoryStream())
{
Document document = new Document(PageSize.A4);
PdfWriter writer = PdfWriter.GetInstance(document, mem);
writer.PageEvent = new MyHeaderNFooter();
document.Open();
var font = new
Font(BaseFont.CreateFont("C:\\Downloads\\fonts\\Rubik-Light.ttf", BaseFont.IDENTITY_H, BaseFont.NOT_EMBEDDED), 14);
Paragraph p = new Paragraph("פסקת פתיחה")
{
Alignment = Element.ALIGN_RIGHT
};
PdfPTable table = new PdfPTable(2)
{
RunDirection = PdfWriter.RUN_DIRECTION_RTL
};
PdfPCell cell = new PdfPCell(new Phrase("מזהה", font));
cell.BackgroundColor = BaseColor.BLACK;
table.AddCell(cell);
document.Add(p);
document.Add(table);
document.Close();
pdfBytes = mem.ToArray();
}
return pdfBytes;
}
The PDF comes out blank

Answer 1

I changed a few details of your code, and now I get this:
My changes:
Embedding the font
As I don't have Rubik installed on my system, I have to embed the font into the PDF to have a chance to see anything. Thus, I replaced BaseFont.NOT_EMBEDDED by BaseFont.EMBEDDED when creating the var font:
var font = new Font(BaseFont.CreateFont("Rubik-Light.ttf", BaseFont.IDENTITY_H, BaseFont.EMBEDDED), 14);
Making the Paragraph kind of work
You create the Paragraph p without specifying a font. Thus, a default font with default encoding is used. The default encoding is WinAnsiEncoding which is Latin1-like, so no Hebrew characters can be represented. I added your Rubik font instance to the Paragraph p creation:
Paragraph p = new Paragraph("פסקת פתיחה", font)
{
Alignment = Element.ALIGN_RIGHT
};
Et voilà, the writing appears.
iText developers often have communicated that in iText 5.x and earlier right-to-left scripts are only supported properly in certain contexts, e.g. in tables, but not in others like paragraphs immediately added to the document. As your Paragraph p is added immediately to the Document document, its letters appear in the wrong order in the output.
Making the PdfPTable work
You defined the PdfPTable table to have two columns (new PdfPTable(2)) but then you added only one cell. Thus, table contains not even a single complete row. iText, therefore, draws nothing when it is added to the document.
I changed the definition of table to have a single column only:
PdfPTable table = new PdfPTable(1)
{
RunDirection = PdfWriter.RUN_DIRECTION_RTL
};
Furthermore, I commented out the line setting the cell background to black because usually it is difficult to read black on black:
PdfPCell cell = new PdfPCell(new Phrase("מזהה", font));
//cell.BackgroundColor = BaseColor.BLACK;
table.AddCell(cell);
And again the writing appears.
Properly downloading the font
Another possible obstacle is that when downloading the font from the URL you gave — https://fonts.google.com/selection?selection.family=Rubik — one can see in the customization tab of the selection drawer that by default only Latin characters are included in the download, in particular not Hebrew ones:
I tested with a font file I downloaded with all language options enabled: