Do You ▖ Unicode in PDF?

One of the changes we included in Cumulative Update #1 for SQL Server 2008 (CU1 download link) is automatic full font embedding and subsetting for Unicode characters in Reporting Services 2008 PDF rendering.

While a similar code change is now available for Reporting Services 2005 PDF rendering with SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 3 (SP3 download link), it is not full font embedding like RS 2008.  Specifically, in RS 2005 if your text contains Latin characters only, no font embedding is happening.  The font embedding in RS 2005 SP3 is limited to non ANSI characters.

Overall, with font embedding it does no longer matter what version of a font is installed on a client - the documents can be viewed the same way regardless of client operating systems, font versions, and client PDF viewer.  Generating multi-lingual reports and using fonts such as MingLiU just got a little bit easier.