Japanese Characters are displayed as "?" when we export report to either PDF or TIFF format

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Problem Description:

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- We had a report that displays the Japanese characters. When we try to export the report to either PDF or TIFF format we don’t see these Japanese characters, instead they are replaced by the character “?”

 

Cause & Resolution:

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- The Arial Unicode MS font allows the display of characters in most languages. This font contains glyphs for all code points within the Unicode Standard, version 2.1.

- We will not have this font installed by default and would generally come with Microsoft Office. Else we will need to have it installed explicitly using an Office setup CD.

- Once we have this installed on the Report Server machine, then we need to make sure we install files for East Asian Languages. We do this as per the following steps:

o Go to Control Panel. Select “Regional and Language Options”

o Go to Languages Tab, check “Install files for East Asian Languages”. Once installation is done we have to reboot the machine.

o We have to use Arial Unicode MS instead of Arial

- Sometimes even if we had followed the above steps, we may run into the issue mentioned in the problem description. Then follow the below stated steps:

o Go to the IIS Manager and select Reports Virtual directory.

o Go to the properties of the Report Manager, and Virtual Directory tab, Configuration button. Under Application extensions look for .axd, select and hit on edit.

o In the .axd extension if we have “Verify if File Exists” is checked, then we have to remove it.

o Once done, we can do an IIS Reset and check the behavior.

- Also refer the following articles for reference:

o https://support.microsoft.com/?id=287247 [Description of the Arial Unicode MS font in Word 2002]

o https://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms159713.aspx [Designing for PDF Output]

o https://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/2wawkw1c.aspx [Web Site File Types]