Publishing Reports to the Web - Downloads - Oracle

4.6.2 Unicode
Font Types
widely used at runtime and then generate with the NLS environment variable (NLS_
LANG) set to that particular character set.
If you design and generate an application in one character set and run it in another
character set, performance can suffer. Furthermore, if the runtime character set does
not contain all the characters in the generate character set, then question marks appear
in place of the unrecognized characters. Portable Document Format (PDF) supports
multibyte character sets. There might be situations where you create an application
with a specific font but find that a different font is being used when you run that
application. You would most likely encounter this when using an English font (such as
MS Sans Serif or Arial) in environments other than Western European. This occurs
because Oracle Reports checks to see if the character set associated with the font
matches the character set specified by the language environment variable (NLS_LANG).
If the two do not match, Oracle Reports automatically substitutes the font with another
font whose associated character set matches the character set specified by the language
environment variable. This automatic substitution assures that the data being returned
from the database gets displayed correctly in the application. Note: If you enter local
characters using an English font, then Windows does an implicit association with
another font. There might be cases, however, where you do not want this substitution
to take place. You can avoid this substitution by mapping all desired fonts to the
WE8ISO8859P1 character set in the font alias file (uifont.ali).
Unicode is a global character set that allows multilingual text to be displayed in a
single application. This enables multinational corporations to develop a single
multilingual application and deploy it worldwide. Oracle Reports provides Unicode
support. If you use Unicode, you are able to display multiple languages, both
single-byte languages such as those spoken in Western Europe, Eastern Europe,
Bidirectional Middle Eastern, and multibyte Asian languages such as Chinese,
Japanese, and Korean (CJK) in the same application. Use of a single character set that
encompasses all languages eliminates the need to have various character sets for
various languages. For example, to display a multibyte language such as Japanese, the
NLS_LANG environment variable must be set to the following:
NLS_LANG=JAPAN_JAPANESE.JA16SJIS
To display a single-byte language such as German, NLS_LANG must be set to the
following:
NLS_LANG=GERMAN_GERMANY.WE8ISO8859P1
The obvious disadvantage of this scheme is that applications can only display
characters from one character set at a time. Mixed character set data is not possible.
With the Unicode character set, you can set the character set portion of NLS_LANG to
UTF8 instead of a specific language character set. This allows characters from different
languages and character sets to be displayed simultaneously. For example, to display
Japanese and German together on the screen, the NLS_LANG variable must be set to
one of the following:
NLS_LANG=JAPAN_JAPANESE.UTF8
NLS_LANG=GERMAN_GERMANY.UTF8
Oracle Reports relies on the operating system for the font and input method for
different languages. To enter and display text in a particular language, you must be
running a version of the operating system that supports that language. Font support is
limited but not restricted to the operating system font. Windows NT release 4.0 and
Managing Fonts in Oracle Reports 4-23