Kyle: TIL a new word! I don’t think that I’d ever heard “yinz” before. Thanks for keeping life interesting, Kyle! Once you start going down that path of trying to turn HTML and CSS into a PDF programmatically, I think that you need to start using a proper rendering engine. I’ve used “wkhtmltopdf” (Qt Webkit engine), Puppeteer, Playwright, and headless Chrome. There are a few CPAN modules for working with “wkhtmltopdf” although it looks like they all wrap the binary rather than being Perl bindings for the C library but that’s probably OK. https://metacpan.org/pod/WKHTMLTOPDF https://metacpan.org/pod/PDF::WebKit Looks like it’s also available in Debian and Ubuntu: https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=wkhtmltopdf https://packages.ubuntu.com/bionic/wkhtmltopdf. -- Indranil: I think that you may be right about PDF::Reuse (and friends) not being up to the task overall… However, I discovered that a number of Chinese fonts like Noto CJK fonts (e.g. Noto Sans TC) and WenQuanYi (https://packages.ubuntu.com/bionic/fonts-wqy-zenhei) actually contain glyphs for both English and Chinese. Using “fontforge”, I was able to create a TTF file from the WenQuanYi TTC file, which can be used by Koha’s Label Creator to print both English and Chinese on the same label using the same font. I just referenced my new TTF via koha-conf.xml and voila! (I did notice that if I copy the text from the PDF and paste it elsewhere, it will just show gibberish, but apparently that’s a pre-existing problem with the PDF generator…) Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get a good quality TTF from the Noto Sans TC. It worked well on the Chinese and English but it couldn’t display space characters, so I couldn’t use that in the end. I find this whole font business very interesting. Personally, I’d love to know how browsers and word processors decide which font to apply. I keep thinking that they must have maps based off of Unicode code points and then choose an appropriate font based on that. But I don’t know for sure. In theory, PDF::Reuse could be changed to use “fontconfig” to see what font is available on the OS for a particular Unicode codepoint, so we could write a simple algorithm combined with a hash map to provide better font support for Koha’s Label Creator… but yeah it would take some time and energy. While I find it interesting, I’m not sure that I find it interesting enough to devote my free time to it. I guess we’ll see how long this tickles my brain. David Cook Senior Software Engineer Prosentient Systems Suite 7.03 6a Glen St Milsons Point NSW 2061 Australia Office: 02 9212 0899 Online: 02 8005 0595 From: Kyle Hall <kyle@bywatersolutions.com> Sent: Thursday, 30 June 2022 9:27 PM To: Indranil Das Gupta <indradg@l2c2.co.in> Cc: dcook@prosentient.com.au; Koha-devel <koha-devel@lists.koha-community.org>; Brendan Gallagher <brendan@bywatersolutions.com> Subject: Re: [Koha-devel] Multilingual label printing in Koha (praise be to Bywater!) That's awesome! Thanks Yinz! I think the unicorn we need is something like https://metacpan.org/pod/PDF::FromHTML but with support for CSS. AFAIK such a thing doesn't exist :/ Kyle On Thu, Jun 30, 2022 at 5:48 AM Indranil Das Gupta <indradg@l2c2.co.in <mailto:indradg@l2c2.co.in> > wrote: Yep! the Bywater Solutions plugin by Kyle does the job nicely "outside the box" :-) IIRC the label printing code was last worked on by Chris N a long long time back. As far as I can tell the non Latin printing issue is due to the PDF library we are using. Prolly needs a rewrite for that part which requires both time and funds :-( -Indranil On Thu, 30 Jun, 2022, 12:34 pm , <dcook@prosentient.com.au <mailto:dcook@prosentient.com.au> > wrote: Hi all, I had a problem where I couldn't print Chinese and English on barcode labels using Koha's built-in Label Creator, since it uses individual font files and I couldn't find a free and open individual font that supports both European and Chinese scripts. Fortunately, I recalled that Kyle @ ByWater Solutions created this plugin: https://github.com/bywatersolutions/koha-plugin-label-maker. It uses HTML and CSS to generate labels in the browser, and the browser is already capable of using multiple different fonts to support multiple different scripts. The plugin did a great job of rendering barcodes with both Chinese and English written on them! Thanks, Bywater Solutions, for saving the day! -- Nerdy thoughts: If I look at the "Computed" styles in the F12 tools in Chrome on Windows 10, it says the English is rendered using the "Times New Roman" font, and it says that the Chinese is rendered using the "Microsoft YaHei" font. If I do the same thing in Microsoft Word, the English is in "Calibri" and the Chinese is in "DengXian". If you read https://fonts.google.com/noto/use#how-are-noto-fonts-organized it says "If you have text in multiple languages that use different scripts, either the app or the person who typesets the text needs to switch between the different fonts accordingly." I'm not an expert on fonts, so I'm not sure what would be involved with getting Koha's PDF libraries to use different fonts for different scripts. I don't know how Chrome and Word detect that they need to use a different font. I don't know if it's a map of Unicode codepoints to existing font mappings, or if it iterates through a list of fallbacks, or what. I probably won't go too far down this rabbit hole, since the ByWater Koha Plugin solved my immediate use case, but it's an interesting topic, and this is a major limitation with Koha's Label Creator, so we might want to think about a change in the future... David Cook Senior Software Engineer Prosentient Systems Suite 7.03 6a Glen St Milsons Point NSW 2061 Australia Office: 02 9212 0899 Online: 02 8005 0595 _______________________________________________ Koha-devel mailing list Koha-devel@lists.koha-community.org <mailto:Koha-devel@lists.koha-community.org> https://lists.koha-community.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/koha-devel website : https://www.koha-community.org/ git : https://git.koha-community.org/ bugs : https://bugs.koha-community.org/ -- Kyle M. Hall Loose Cannon, ByWater Solutions <mailto:kyle@bywatersolutions.com> kyle@bywatersolutions.com <http://bywatersolutions.com/> https://bywatersolutions.com <http://bywatersolutions.com/what-is-koha/> What is Koha?