Handling non-Latin characters in PDFs
Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew, Cyrillic… The Asiatis guide to avoiding encoding and display problems.
By Asiatis • Multilingual DTP experts since 2000
Common problems
Frequent symptoms:
- Squares □□□ instead of characters
- Reversed or wrongly ordered text (Arabic, Hebrew)
- “Tofu” characters (empty rectangles)
- Incorrectly substituted fonts
Solutions by writing system
CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean)
- Recommended fonts: Noto Sans CJK, Source Han Sans, Adobe Ming Std.
- Encoding: UTF-8 is mandatory. Avoid legacy encodings (GB2312, Shift-JIS).
- PDF export: embed 100% of the glyphs used.
Arabic and Hebrew (RTL)
- Direction: enable RTL (right-to-left) support in InDesign/Illustrator.
- Ligatures: Arabic uses contextual ligatures (OpenType required).
- Fonts: Adobe Arabic, Noto Sans Arabic, Scheherazade.
Cyrillic
- Character sets: check support for specific characters (Serbian, Bulgarian, Ukrainian).
- Fonts: PT Sans, Noto Sans, Roboto (Extended versions).
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