Transforms a docx file with Asian Character to pdf

Shyl · January 4, 2021, 2:18pm

Hi there,
What I was going to do was turning a Microsoft Word file into pdf, with just Libreoffice command line. But the issue I have is, that every characters got transformed quite well, but the Asian characters – in my case, Simplified Chinese – was turned into blocks. And I just write to ask whether there is any hidden parameters, configuration settings, etc, to make this function work.
The command line I used was

/opt/libreoffice7.0/program/soffice.bin --headless --norestore --invisible --nodefault --nofirststartwizard --nolockcheck --nologo --convert-to "pdf" --outdir /tmp/ 1.docx

anon73440385 · January 4, 2021, 2:34pm

Does an export to PDF work using GUI?

ajlittoz · January 4, 2021, 2:38pm

If Asian characters are turned into block, the designated font for text does not contain Chinese characters.

petermau · January 4, 2021, 3:53pm

Do you need to enable ASIAN Languages as the default setting for this version of LibreOffice? Are you getting a � (U+FFFD) which is giving a character error, or a plain block which is a character missing in the font.

Shyl · January 5, 2021, 2:38am

Thanks. What I got is a plain block which means a character missing. However, the file could be opened correctly – of course – via Microsoft Word. And I have not tried any GUI version, as I am running it on Amazon Linux 2, originally with no intention to bring in a GUI. But am going to have a try to see how it goes.

petermau · January 5, 2021, 5:21pm

There are a number of questions related to the use of Chinese Ideograms in LibreOffice. Perhaps they can help you here.

You will get these character blocks to replace the normal characters if the Font you are using either does not support the Chinese ideograms or LibreOffice has not been set up to provide support by default or for this particular document. The comments below apply to you creating the document directly, but may be of some help in your case.

I assume the original file is using the standard Unicode (UTF-8) character set to support the Chinese characters. If you were creating the file from scratch you must tell LibreOffice to enable Asian Languages and select a font that contains Chinese Characters, such as GungsuhChe. The default fonts, such as Aerial do not. (TOOLS > OPTIONS > LANGUAGE SETTING > LANGUAGE SETTINGS > ASIAN).
Also, if the original file is not a normal .odt but a .doc or .docx, you must tell LibreOffice what font to use instead of the one selected in the Word document. (TOOLS > OPTIONS > LIBREOFFICE > FONTS).