Unnecessary Chinese font in PDF

[bowesmana]

I am exporting PDFs from a dashboard. When opening the PDF and scrolling through, Acrobat tells me it needs to install the Simplified Chinese fonts and I can't figure out why as there are no Chinese character in the text.

I see that one of the fonts in the PDF properties is STSong-lite font, which a CID font with UniGB-UCS2-H encoding. I wonder if this is the reason.

I can install the fonts and the problem goes away, but these reports need to be sent to many people and they have no relationship with China and might find it odd to have to install these fonts.

Oddly out of 12 reports, half have this problem and the other half not...

Any idea how to debug this case and to stop it from doing this...?

[jlaw · Accepted solution]

Which version of Splunk are you using? Do you have the PDF Report Server App installed, or is this just with the built-in integrated PDF generation?

[jlaw]

Be careful, the app is hard to configure and keep working. (I was not recommending it, just trying to narrow down where the problem was coming from.) And advances in SimpleXML in Splunk 6 give more functionality to the integrated PDF generation. You still need the app if you want to print Flash or advanced XML, but you should probably be weeding those out of your dashboards anyway.

[bowesmana]

Shame it requires an enterprise licence, our max data for 12 months is <8MB...

[bowesmana]

Splunk 6. It's just the integrated PDF generation from a Dashboard. So, there's an app... Mmm, jolly good - is it the bee's knees? 🙂

I just worked out what Splunk is doing to cause this. I have certain Unicode punctuation characters in my data, in particular U+2018, which causes this. I've added a rex statement that strips these out and it stops doing it.

Thanks for the PDF app info, I'll go explore, the internal is a bit basic...