Drawing unicode text

I am currently evaluating the quickpdf library for purchase. Our primary work involves Hebrew texts, hence I began by experimenting with Quickpdf's ability to write Hebrew text within a PDF document. However, here I ran into a problem.
If I simply start by opening a file and calling DrawText with a Hebrew string, the string is not properly written to the file: viewing the file in Acrobat shows a blank screen. If I DrawText a string that is partially numbers and partially Hebrew letters, the numbers how but the Hebrew characters do not.
I tried adding a call to AddTrueTypeFont(), to specify the "Arial Unicode MS" font, which contains a fairly complete set of Hebrew codepoints. However, even with that call, and a subsequent call to select the font (both of which returned success), the Hebrew characters are still missing in the resulting PDF.
I did manage to successfully output Hebrew text by calling AddTrueTypeSubsettedFont(), and by providing it with the full Hebrew alphabet in quotes. However, I was then limited to that specific set of characters, and none of punctuation marks or numbers were output correctly. However, I don't want to be limited a specific set of characters; I want to be able to write out any unicode character.
I'm looking for a way to simply include a truetype font with all its relevant unicode codepoints (without necessarily embedding the font), and to then be able to write unicode text freely without having to create a font subset for each DrawText.  (I did try to feed AddTrueTypeSubsettedFont() a subset that included all ASCII characters and all characters in the Hebrew code page, but that didn't work either).
Any ideas?

Hi Ingo,
Thank you for you quick reply.
I remain puzzled, though, by your use of the terms encodeUtf16 and decodeUtf16. A search for these terms in the Quickpdf documents (developer guide and function reference) does not turn up any results, nor are there any results when searching the forum for these terms (other than your message itself).
To what do you refer when you say "use something like encodeUtf16"?
(I'm using QuickPDF version 8.13. All of the strings that I am sending to DrawText are widechar Unicode16 strings).

Hi ashmid,

I did a little play with your problem. It gives you a foot in the door. First a bad news:

It seems to be, that QuickPDF (8.13, Delphi 7, Windows XP) deals with unicode fonts only ouside the ascii-range, when you set a codepage. Ommitting the codepage in the fontname brings a lot of white screen but no text.

But independend from the codepage you have sure the ascii-codes<128 too.

The problem not so much inside QuickPDF, the most is around. In my example, I deal with unicodes as numbers. I did make no assumption about the real source of the text to draw.

Here the samplecode:
var
  QP: TQuickPDF;
  x, tw: double;
  i: integer;
  w: WideString;
  wc: wideChar;
  id_heb: integer;
const // example letters from start of genesis
// source: http://www.ancient-hebrew.org/14_htmlfonts.html)
  genesis: array[0..50] of integer =
 (1489,1468,1456,1512,1461,1513,1473,1460,1497,1514,
  1489,1468,1464,1512,1464,1488,1488,1457,1500,1465,
  1492,1460,1497,1501,1488,1461,1514,1492,1463,1513,
  1473,1468,1464,1502,1463,1497,1460,1501,1493,1456,
  1488,1461,1514,1492,1464,1488,1464,1512,1462,1509,1475);
  aleph: WideChar = WideChar($05D0); // give them names if you want
  holam: WideChar = WideChar($05B9);
begin
  QP := TQuickPDF.Create;
  QP.UnlockKey({$I PDFkey.inc});
  QP.SetMeasurementUnits(1);
  QP.SetOrigin(0);
  QP.SetPageDimensions(210, 297);
// for me it looks as AddTrueTypeFont without codepage does not work for unicode
// so we need the font multiple with different codepages for different languages

  id_heb := QP.AddTrueTypeFont('Microsoft Sans Serif {1255}', 0); // important
  QP.SelectFont(id_heb);
  QP.SetTextSize(16);

  w := '';
  for i:=0 to SizeOf(genesis)-1
  do w := WideChar(genesis[ i ])+w; // make it unicode from right to left
  QP.DrawText(20,270, w);

  QP.SetTextSize(8);
  QP.DrawText(20, 260, 'now we try to make it better:');

  QP.SetTextSize(16);
  x := 150; tw := 0;
  for i:=0 to SizeOf(genesis)-1
  do begin
    wc := WideChar(genesis[ i ]);
    if (ord(wc)>=$05D0)  // letter or other
    then begin
      x := x-tw;         // left by the size of last letter before
      tw := QP.GetTextWidth(wc);
      QP.DrawText(x, 260, wc);
    end
    else begin // here is more to do: depending on correct position to the letter
      QP.DrawText(x+tw/2, 260, wc); // but I have not the knowledge for this
    end;
  end;
// show letters + (ascii-)numbers
  w := '';
  for i:=$05D0 to $05EA  // hebrew letters
  do begin
    wc := WideChar(i);
    w := wc + w;         // bring the letters in right to left order
  end;
// and numbers too
  for i:=ord('9') downto ord('0') do w := WideChar(i) + w;
  QP.SelectFont(id_heb);
  QP.SetTextSize(16);
  QP.DrawText(180-QP.GetTextWidth(w), 250, w);

I don't know anything about rules for diacrytics-positions and what I really write in hebrew. You may see that I decide easy by unicode-value how to deal a single char and put the text char by char on the line. So you have a way for correct position of akcents and so on. There is something to do, but you may see it works.


Cheers,
Werner