HTML to PDF with Japanese

Question 1

It took me some time to reproduce the problem. Here is the minimal HTML:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/>

    <!-- jQuery 2.0.2 -->
    <script type="application/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.0.2/jquery.min.js"></script>

    <script type="application/javascript" src="tableExport.js"></script>
    <script type="application/javascript" src="jquery.base64.js"></script>
    <script type="application/javascript" src="jspdf/libs/sprintf.js"></script>
    <script type="application/javascript" src="jspdf/jspdf.js"></script>
    <script type="application/javascript" src="jspdf/libs/base64.js"></script>
</head>

<body>
    <table id="nation">
        <tbody>
            <tr>
                <td>
                    中国
                </td>
             </tr>
        </tbody>
    </table>
    <a href="#" onclick ="$('#nation').tableExport({type:'pdf',escape:'false'});">PDF</a>
</body>
</html>

Here is the complete folder (including the js) so you can test locally: http://bit.ly/1fW0YbX.

If you look at the generated PDF, it only uses the standard PDF font Helvetica which supports the Latin-1 character set only. This is why you do not see the expected Japanese glyphs. I couldn't find any related option for the HTML table export jquery plugin so I guess it just isn't supported. But maybe I am missing a localization plugin.

Question 2

Simply put, character encoding denotes how characters—letters, digits and other symbols—are represented as bits and bytes for storage and communication. The HTTP request header Accept-Charset can be used by a client to indicate how the response message can be encoded.

use utf-16 for encoding