Redmine

I think I found something about this problem:

the fonts in the generated pdf file are Helvetica, Helvetica-Bold and Helvetica-Oblique
I don't have these fonts and the Acrobat Reader uses some arial fonts, but it seems they don't support full utf-8.
So, the result is broken characters (in my case Bulgarian).
JP, if there is a way to change the font in the pdf when exporting it, please try it.

Regards,
Nikolay

Problem is also in encoding, which is set to ANSI, but should be set to UTF-8. Also, it should be good idea to use OpenType fonts, because they are platform-independent (I'm not sure how it's with OpenType on Linux).

There is a new version of rfpdf based on other pdf encoder - http://github.com/edwinmoss/rfpdf/tree/master
I got correct russian letters using it and FreeSans fonts in linux

There news about PDF generation.

1. Michael Baikov successfully upgrade Redmine with the latest rfpdf, see this thread
2. There's a new cool kid in the place: Prawn is a full ruby PDF generator. Easy usage, nice features (text + images and so on) and of course deal great with UTF-8 and fonts.

Could be interesting to compare rfpdf and Prawn...

Prawn can definitely handle the PDF output here, at least what I see when I click the PDF button on the bottom right. If someone wants to build a Prawn based patch for Redmine, get in touch and I'll help with whatever you need.

I will try to make a Prawn based patch.

I checked several things. Prawn can be used there, but lacks certain features: bold/italic fonts are most important to make reports identical to those, which created with rfpdf right now. I will add Prawn support to redmine, but i do not want to fix prawn as well :)

+1 for this issue. Export PDF is broken for Russian language.

Way to reproduce:
Select "My account" on the top of this page and change language to Russian or Bulgarian.
Then just export any issue from this site to PDF.