Dear All,

I have a time sensitive question as I need to deliver urgently and hope someone can help.

We have a questionnaire in English and Amharic (yes, we do .

- Printable Survey Export works fine
- queXMLPDF export does desplan the answer options correctly, but all other text is not displayed (only ????)
- HTML export works fine as well

Any suggestions or ideas (to me it seems the queXML export uses a different font for question texts and welcome text, which is not available.. but where to change tat as we did not change anything in the export settings

Urgent assistance would be extremely welcome

Cheers

Thorsten

Additional info: Once I open the PDF in Acrobat and export it to Word, the text is back and fully correct.

Hi, Thorsten
you know the queXML stuff is developed and supported by the quexml.acspri.org.au/

You also find them here under "Partners".

So in my opinion they are the best to help.

Joffm

Joffm wrote: So in my opinion they are the best to help.

I would recommend to open a bug report in LimeSurvey. It looks like a change in the font selection will do the trick.

@jelo have surely right

The fix can be done in config : github.com/LimeSurvey/LimeSurvey/blob/ff...ig-defaults.php#L347

Try with force 'pdfdefaultfont'=> 'dejavusans' and if it's OK, we can easily fix it in default config inside the alternatepdffontfile array.

Hi,

I did the following:
- added 'am'=>'dejavusans',
- uploaded the config-defaults again

The result is even worse . Now answer options are also not readable any more (same with 'am'=>'freesans', which seems to be the font embedded in the PDF)

While in the original, the answer options were readable (and the font thus OK), the change seems to have worked, but not to the better)

I think we are on the right track. Would need a font in the application. People recommend Nyala (if I include 'am'=>'nyala' it of course gives me an error message that eh font cannot be found)

Any additional ideas?

Cheers

Thorsten

thtrede wrote: The result is even worse . Now answer options are also not readable any more (same with 'am'=>'freesans', which seems to be the font embedded in the PDF)

If you cannot identify the working font inside the queXML PDF export, you can post the PDF here to allow us to identify the working font.
So revert the change. Create the PDF with the partial readable section. Attach the PDF here.

Depending on your PDFviewer the fonts embedded or defined are listed somewhere.

Hi,

I would take the easy way (for me) and send the PDF here... but even page 1 of the PDF in reduced size and in a ZIP exceeds the 2 BM allowed here.

I put the file here: applicatio.com/owncloud/index.php/s/IbzHlbKF2DmTska


If there is anything I can do to sort it out on my side, let me know... and thanks a million for the great support (for a language not so often used in Europe

Thorsten

thtrede wrote: I would take the easy way (for me) and send the PDF here..

The working font is "FreeSerif". That seems to have the "Amharic" characters included.


But the additional styles (like FreeSerif bold, italic etc.) seem to have the "Amharic" characters not included.


Are you aware of a truetype/opentype font, that contain all styles (bold, italic). Replacing the font in the LimeSurvey installation might be easier than removing the styles from the queXML definition file.

Unfortunately no. I am not really into fonts (andDr. Goolge could not help me). Sorry

I'm not using queXML, so it might be possible to enforce a certain style onto the whole document. But choosing the right font is crucial.

If you work with "Amharic", you should be able to check.

Take a look at this font here:
software.sil.org/abyssinica/

That should work. Even though the font has additional characters in the Private Use Area to support languages that require Ethiopic characters not yet encoded in Unicode.

Support: Ethiopic (including supplement and extended blocks), Latin
OpenType Layout Tables: default (default, Amharic), Ethiopic (default, Amharic)

You should install the font on your local PC to check documents first.
If that font is working, you would need to install that font on the system, where LimeSurvey is installed.

About fonts : currently it's included in github.com/LimeSurvey/LimeSurvey/tree/master/assets/fonts
Maybe we need to update to FreeSans in replacement of DejaVu ?

Then we can add all www.gnu.org/software/freefont/ ttf file for bold, italic, BoldItalic … ?

When i test the fonts for arabic in 2013 (5 years ago) it was the best solution for ar.

If someone cac check FreeSans for all language : it's great