PDFlib 8 Windows COM/.NET Tutorial

Host encoding. The special encoding host does not have any fixed meaning, but will be
mapped to another 8-bit encoding depending on the current platform as follows (see
Table 4.2):
> on IBM zSeries with MVS or USS it will be mapped to ebcdic;
> on IBM i5/iSeries it will be mapped to ebcdic_37;
> on Windows it will be mapped to winansi;
> on all other systems (including Mac OS X) it will be mapped to iso8859-1;
Host encoding is primarily useful for writing platform-independent test programs (like
those contained in the PDFlib distribution) and other simple applications. Host encoding
is not recommended for production use, but should be replaced by whatever encoding
is appropriate.
Automatic encoding. PDFlib supports a mechanism which can be used to specify the
most natural encoding for certain environments without further ado. Supplying the
keyword auto as an encoding name specifies a platform- and environment-specific 8-bit
encoding for text fonts as follows:
> On Windows: the current system code page (see below for details)
> On Unix and Mac OS X: iso8859-1 (except LWFN PostScript fonts on the Mac for which
auto will be mapped to macroman)
> On IBM i5/iSeries: the current job’s encoding (IBMCCSID000000000000)
> On IBM zSeries: ebcdic (=code page 1047).
For symbol fonts the keyword auto is mapped to builtin encoding (see Section 5.4.2, »Selecting
an Encoding for symbolic Fonts«, page 129). While automatic encoding is convenient
in many circumstances, using this method will make your PDFlib client programs
inherently non-portable.
Encoding auto is used as the default encoding for Name strings (see Section 4.4.3,
»Strings in non-Unicode-aware Language Bindings«, page 109) in non-Unicode-aware
language bindings, since this is the most appropriate encoding for file names etc.
User-defined 8-bit encodings. In addition to predefined encodings PDFlib supports
user-defined 8-bit encodings. These are the way to go if you want to deal with some
character set which is not internally available in PDFlib, such as EBCDIC character sets
different from the one supported internally in PDFlib. PDFlib supports encoding tables
defined by PostScript glyph names, as well as tables defined by Unicode values.
The following tasks must be done before a user-defined encoding can be used in a
PDFlib program (alternatively the encoding can also be constructed at runtime using
encoding_set_char( )):
> Generate a description of the encoding in a simple text format.
> Configure the encoding in the PDFlib resource file (see Section 3.1.3, »Resource Configuration
and File Search«, page 62) or via set_parameter( ).
> Provide a font (metrics and possibly outline file) that supports all characters used in
the encoding.
The encoding file simply lists glyph names and numbers line by line. The following excerpt
shows the start of an encoding definition:
% Encoding definition for PDFlib, based on glyph names
% name code Unicode (optional)
space 32 0x0020
102 Chapter 4: Unicode and Legacy Encodings (Edition for COM, .NET, and REALbasic)