We Keep Coding

U+FFFD is not available in this font's encoding: WinAnsiEncoding

I'm using PDFBox 2.0.1.
I try to dynamically add some (user provided) UTF8 text to the form fields and show the result to the user. Unfortunately either the pdf library is not capable of properly encoding special characters such as "äöü"... or I was not able find any useful documentation that could help me with this issue.
Can someone tell me what is wrong with the given code sample?
try (PDDocument document = PDDocument.load(pdfTemplate)) {
PDDocumentCatalog catalog = document.getDocumentCatalog();
PDAcroForm form = catalog.getAcroForm();
List<PDField> fields = form.getFields();
for (PDField field : fields) {
switch (field.getPartialName()) {
case "devices":
// Frontend (JS): userInput = btoa('Gerät')
String userInput = ...
String name = new String(Base64.getDecoder().decode(base64devices), "UTF-8");
field.setReadOnly(true);
break;
}
}
form.flatten(fields, true);
document.save(bos);
}
And here the stacktrace of the error:
java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: U+FFFD is not available in this font's encoding: WinAnsiEncoding
org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.font.PDTrueTypeFont.encode(PDTrueTypeFont.java:368)
org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.font.PDFont.encode(PDFont.java:286)
org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.font.PDFont.getStringWidth(PDFont.java:315)
org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.interactive.form.PlainText$Paragraph.getLines(PlainText.java:169)
org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.interactive.form.PlainTextFormatter.format(PlainTextFormatter.java:182)
org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.interactive.form.AppearanceGeneratorHelper.insertGeneratedAppearance(AppearanceGeneratorHelper.java:373)
org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.interactive.form.AppearanceGeneratorHelper.setAppearanceContent(AppearanceGeneratorHelper.java:237)
org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.interactive.form.AppearanceGeneratorHelper.setAppearanceValue(AppearanceGeneratorHelper.java:144)
org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.interactive.form.PDTextField.constructAppearances(PDTextField.java:263)
org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.interactive.form.PDAcroForm.refreshAppearances(PDAcroForm.java:324)
org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.interactive.form.PDAcroForm.flatten(PDAcroForm.java:213)
my.application.service.PDFService.generatePDF(PDFService.java:201)
I also found those (related) issues on SO:
pdfbox: ... is not available in this font's encoding
But that does not help me choose the right encoding or how. IIRC Java uses UTF16 internally for character encoding why is the default not enough though?
Is that an issue of the PDF-document itself or the code I use to set it?
PdfBox encode symbol currency euro
Well its dynamic user input, so there are way to many things I would have to replace myself.
Thus, if the PDFBox people decided to fix the broken PDFBox method, this seemingly clean work-around code here would start to fail as it would then feed the fixed method broken input data.
Admittedly, I doubt they will fix this bug before 2.0.0 (and in 2.0.0 the fixed method has a different name), but one never knows...
Unfortunately I was not able to find this other setter method, but it might also be a different scope it does apply to.
EDIT
Updated example code to better represent the problem.

U+FFFD is used to replace an incoming character whose value is unknown or unrepresentable in Unicode compare the use of U+001A as a control character to indicate the substitute function (source).
That said it is likely that that character gets messed up somewhere. Maybe the encoding of the file is not UTF-8 and that's why the character is messed up.
As a general rule you should only write ASCII characters in the source code. You can still represent the whole Unicode range using the escaped form \uXXXX. In this case ä -> \u00E4.
-- UPDATE --
Apparently the problem is in how the user input get encoded/decoded from client/server side using the JS function btoa. A solution to this problem can be found at this link:
Using Javascript's atob to decode base64 doesn't properly decode utf-8 strings

throw exception when string is not encoded in UTF-8

I've got method where one of input attributes is String xml. I just want to create control for encoding of that xml. If any character is in other encoding that UTF-8, error will be thrown.
can you please tell me the easiest way how to create and test it?
I've used something like this:
String xml = IOUtils.toString(new FileInputStream("c:/encoding.xml"));
Document doc = builder.parse(IOUtils.toInputStream(xml, "UTF-8"));
added letters like Ľ,Š,Ť,Ž,ľ,š,ť,ž and save it as cp1250 file.
but no error.
what am I doing wrong?

This cannot be done natively in Java. A file is just a string of bytes, they can be interpreted however you feel like, Java by default has no way to add meaning. I recommend using this library (no I didn't write it):
http://code.google.com/p/juniversalchardet/
Follow these instructions (copy pasted from that link):
How to use it
Construct an instance of org.mozilla.universalchardet.UniversalDetector.
Feed some data (typically several thousands bytes) to the detector by calling UniversalDetector.handleData().
Notify the detector of the end of data by calling UniversalDetector.dataEnd().
Get the detected encoding name by calling UniversalDetector.getDetectedCharset().
Don't forget to call UniversalDetector.reset() before you reuse the detector instance.

String xml = IOUtils.toString(new FileInputStream("c:/encoding.xml"));
If this IOUtils is org.apache.commons.io.IOUtils then its Javadoc says
"Get the contents of an InputStream as a String using the default character encoding of the platform."
As you are saving as cp1250, I guess cp1250 is also your platform character encoding. What your code would be doing is
Read the file as a byte stream
Convert the byte stream to chars using cp1250 (platform encoding)
Transform the chars to Java internal representation (UTF-16)
Convert from UTF-16 to UTF-8
Create XML document
That will always work as cp1250 really is your file encoding, UTF-16 has every character in cp1250 and UTF-8 has every character in UTF-16.
If you want to read the bytes as UTF-8 and avoid automatic conversions, you should use one of the two-parameter variant of IOUtils.toString():
public static String toString(InputStream input, Charset encoding)
public static String toString(InputStream input, String encoding)
So I would try:
// Helper import: I always forget if the constant is "UTF8" or "UTF-8"
import org.apache.commons.lang.CharEncoding;
String xml = IOUtils.toString(new FileInputStream("c:/encoding.xml"), CharEncoding.UTF_8);
Document doc = builder.parse(IOUtils.toInputStream(xml, CharEncoding.UTF_8));
The rule of thumb here is: NEVER do any byte-to-string / string-to-byte conversion without specifying the source / destination encoding.
A minor rule of thumb would be: Unless you need to use some other encoding, use UTF-8 everywhere.
Both of those rules of thumb are independent of your programming language of choice.

UTF8 convertion for text obtained from internet

ElasticSearch is a search Server which accepts data only in UTF8.
When i tries to give ElasticSearch following text
Small businesses potentially in line for a lighter reporting load include those with an annual turnover of less than £440,000, net assets of less than £220,000 and fewer than ten employees"
Through my java application - Basically my java application takes this info from a webpage , and gives it to elasticSearch. ES complaints it cant understand £ and it fails. After filtering through below code -
byte bytes[] = s.getBytes("ISO-8859-1");
s = new String(bytes, "UTF-8");
Here £ is converted to �
But then when I copy it to a file in my home directory using bash and it goes in fine. Any pointers will help.

You have ISO-8895-1 octets in bytes, which you then tell String to decode as if it were UTF-8. When it does that, it doesn't recognize the illegal 0xA3 sequence and replaces it with the substitution character.
To do this, you have to construct the string with the encoding it uses, then convert it to the encoding that you want. See How do I convert between ISO-8859-1 and UTF-8 in Java?.

UTF-8 is easier than one thinks. In String everything is unicode characters.
Bytes/string conversion is done as follows.
(Note Cp1252 or Windows-1252 is the Windows Latin1 extension of ISO-8859-1; better use
that one.)
BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(
new InputStreamReader(new FileInputStream(file), "Cp1252"));
PrintWriter out = new PrintWriter(
new OutputStreamWriter(new FileOutputStream(file), "UTF-8"));
response.setContentType("text/html; charset=UTF-8");
response.setEncoding("UTF-8");
String s = "20 \u00A3"; // Escaping
To see why Cp1252 is more suitable than ISO-8859-1:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows-1252

String s is a series of characters that are basically independent of any character encoding (ok, not exactly independent, but close enough for our needs now). Whatever encoding your data was in when you loaded it into a String has already been decoded. The decoding was done either using system default encoding (which is practically ALWAYS AN ERROR, do not ever use system default encoding, trust me I have over 10 years of experience in dealing with bugs related to wrong default encodings) or the encoding you explicitely specified when you loaded the data.
When you call getBytes("ISO-8859-1") for a String, you request that the String is encoded into bytes according to ISO-8859-1 encoding.
When you create a String from a byte array, you need to specify the encoding in which the characters in the byte array are represented. You create a string from a byte array that has been encoded in UTF-8 (and just above you encoded it in ISO-8859-1, that is your error).
What you want to do is:
byte bytes[] = s.getBytes("UTF-8");
s = new String(bytes, "UTF-8");

Converting from Java String to Windows-1252 Format

I want to send a URL request, but the parameter values in the URL can have french characters (eg. è). How do I convert from a Java String to Windows-1252 format (which supports the French characters)?
I am currently doing this:
String encodedURL = new String (unencodedUrl.getBytes("UTF-8"), "Windows-1252");
However, it makes:
param=Stationnement extèrieur into param=Stationnement extérieur .
How do I fix this? Any suggestions?
Edit for further clarification:
The user chooses values from a drop down. When the language is French, the values from the drop down sometimes include French characters, like 'è'. When I send this request to the server, it fails, saying it is unable to decipher the request. I have to figure out how to send the 'è' as a different format (preferably Windows-1252) that supports French characters. I have chosen to send as Windows-1252. The server will accept this format. I don't want to replace each character, because I could miss a special character, and then the server will throw an exception.

Use URLEncoder to encode parameter values as application/x-www-form-urlencoded data:
String param = "param="
+ URLEncoder.encode("Stationnement extr\u00e8ieur", "cp1252");
See here for an expanded explanation.

Try using
String encodedURL = new String (unencodedUrl.getBytes("UTF-8"), Charset.forName("Windows-1252"));

As per McDowell's suggestion, I tried encoding doing:
URLEncoder.encode("stringValueWithFrechCharacters", "cp1252") but it didn't work perfectly. I replayced "cp1252" with HTTP.ISO_8859_1 because I believe Android does not have the support for Windows-1252 yet. It does allow for ISO_8859_1, and after reading here, this supports MOST of the French characters, with the exception of 'Œ', 'œ', and 'Ÿ'.
So doing this made it work:
URLEncoder.encode(frenchString, HTTP.ISO_8859_1);
Works perfectly!

UTF-8 character encoding in Java

I am having some problems getting some French text to convert to UTF8 so that it can be displayed properly, either in a console, text file or in a GUI element.
The original string is
HANDICAP╔ES
which is supposed to be
HANDICAPÉES
Here is a code snippet that shows how I am using the jackcess Database driver to read in the Acccess MDB file in an Eclipse/Linux environment.
Database database = Database.open(new File(filepath));
Table table = database.getTable(tableName, true);
Iterator rowIter = table.iterator();
while (rowIter.hasNext()) {
Map<String, Object> row = this.rowIter.next();
// convert fields to UTF
Map<String, Object> rowUTF = new HashMap<String, Object>();
try {
for (String key : row.keySet()) {
Object o = row.get(key);
if (o != null) {
String valueCP850 = o.toString();
// String nameUTF8 = new String(valueCP850.getBytes("CP850"), "UTF8"); // does not work!
String valueISO = new String(valueCP850.getBytes("CP850"), "ISO-8859-1");
String valueUTF8 = new String(valueISO.getBytes(), "UTF-8"); // works!
rowUTF.put(key, valueUTF8);
}
}
} catch (UnsupportedEncodingException e) {
System.err.println("Encoding exception: " + e);
}
}
In the code you'll see where I want to convert directly to UTF8, which doesn't seem to work, so I have to do a double conversion. Also note that there doesn't seem to be a way to specify the encoding type when using the jackcess driver.
Thanks,
Cam

New analysis, based on new information.
It looks like your problem is with the encoding of the text before it was stored in the Access DB. It seems it had been encoded as ISO-8859-1 or windows-1252, but decoded as cp850, resulting in the string HANDICAP╔ES being stored in the DB.
Having correctly retrieved that string from the DB, you're now trying to reverse the original encoding error and recover the string as it should have been stored: HANDICAPÉES. And you're accomplishing that with this line:
String valueISO = new String(valueCP850.getBytes("CP850"), "ISO-8859-1");
getBytes("CP850") converts the character ╔ to the byte value 0xC9, and the String constructor decodes that according to ISO-8859-1, resulting in the character É. The next line:
String valueUTF8 = new String(valueISO.getBytes(), "UTF-8");
...does nothing. getBytes() encodes the string in the platform default encoding, which is UTF-8 on your Linux system. Then the String constructor decodes it with the same encoding. Delete that line and you should still get the same result.
More to the point, your attempt to create a "UTF-8 string" was misguided. You don't need to concern yourself with the encoding of Java's strings--they're always UTF-16. When bringing text into a Java app, you just need to make sure you decode it with the correct encoding.
And if my analysis is correct, your Access driver is decoding it correctly; the problem is at the other end, possibly before the DB even comes into the picture. That's what you need to fix, because that new String(getBytes()) hack can't be counted on to work in all cases.
Original analysis, based on no information. :-/
If you're seeing HANDICAP╔ES on the console, there's probably no problem. Given this code:
System.out.println("HANDICAPÉES");
The JVM converts the (Unicode) string to the platform default encoding, windows-1252, before sending it to the console. Then the console decodes that using its own default encoding, which happens to be cp850. So the console displays it wrong, but that's normal. If you want it to display correctly, you can change the console's encoding with this command:
CHCP 1252
To display the string in a GUI element, such as a JLabel, you don't have to do anything special. Just make sure you use a font that can display all the characters, but that shouldn't be problem for French.
As for writing to a file, just specify the desired encoding when you create the Writer:
OutputStreamWriter osw = new OutputStreamWriter(
new FileOutputStream("myFile.txt"), "UTF-8");

String s = "HANDICAP╔ES";
System.out.println(new String(s.getBytes("CP850"), "ISO-8859-1")); // HANDICAPÉES
This shows the correct string value. This means that it was originally encoded/decoded with ISO-8859-1 and then incorrectly encoded with CP850 (originally CP1252 a.k.a. Windows ANSI as pointed in a comment is indeed also possible since the É has the same codepoint there as in ISO-8859-1).
Align your environment and binary pipelines to use all the one and same character encoding. You can't and shouldn't convert between them. You would risk losing information in the non-ASCII range that way.
Note: do NOT use the above code snippet to "fix" the problem! That would not be the right solution.
Update: you are apparently still struggling with the problem. I'll repeat the important parts of the answer:
Align your environment and binary pipelines to use all the one and same character encoding.
You can not and should not convert between them. You would risk losing information in the non-ASCII range that way.
Do NOT use the above code snippet to "fix" the problem! That would not be the right solution.
To fix the problem you need to choose character encoding X which you'd like to use throughout the entire application. I suggest UTF-8. Update MS Access to use encoding X. Update your development environment to use encoding X. Update the java.io readers and writers in your code to use encoding X. Update your editor to read/write files with encoding X. Update the application's user interface to use encoding X. Do not use Y or Z or whatever at some step. If the characters are already corrupted in some datastore (MS Access, files, etc), then you need to fix it by manually replacing the characters right there in the datastore. Do not use Java for this.
If you're actually using the "command prompt" as user interface, then you're actually lost. It doesn't support UTF-8. As suggested in the comments and in the article linked in the comments, you need to create a Swing application instead of relying on the restricted command prompt environment.

You can specify encoding when establishing connection. This way was perfect and solve my encoding problem:
DatabaseImpl open = DatabaseImpl.open(new File("main.mdb"), true, null, Database.DEFAULT_AUTO_SYNC, java.nio.charset.Charset.availableCharsets().get("windows-1251"), null, null);
Table table = open.getTable("FolderInfo");

Using "ISO-8859-1" helped me deal with the French charactes.