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KB438654: The installed Chinese font cannot display when the Dashboard gets exported to PDF after upgrading to MicroStrategy Intelligence Server 10.6.


Yating (Tiffanie) Zhai

Senior Cloud Support Engineer III • MicroStrategy


The installed Chinese font cannot be displayed when exporting the Dashboard to PDF after upgrading to MicroStrategy Intelligence Server 10.6.

SYMPTOM:
After upgraded from Strategy version 10.4 to 10.6, the installed Chinese font doesn't displayed in the Dashboard when exported to PDF.
However, the Dashboard is running correctly in Strategy Web. The Intelligence Server is located on Linux RHEL7.x.

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REPRODUCE STEPS:

  1. Install the Chinese Font in the Linux Intelligence Server machine by placing the font .ttf file in the folder "$MSTR_INSTALL_PATH/PDFGeneratorFiles".
  2. Restar the Intelligence Server to take advantage of the newly installed font.
  3. From Web, creat a Dashboard using this Chinese font. The Dashboard with Chinese font works correctly.
  4. Export the Dashboard to PDF,and the Chinese font doesn't display in the exported PDF file.

CAUSE:
When exporting the Dashboard to PDF, the Intelligence Server retrieves the font information from the dashboard definition in the metadata. If the font in the Dashboard design is installed on the Intelligence Server machine, then it can be rendered properly in the PDF. If the font is not installed on the Intelligence Server machine, it is simply replaced with the default font.
Windows Intelligence Server:
For Strategy Intelligence Server running on a Windows operating system, it uses Microsoft True Type fonts as default when generate a PDF file, and these fonts are typically locally installed with Windows in the Windows\Fonts folder.
Linux/Unix Intelligence Server Universal:
When Strategy Intelligence Server Universal is running on a Unix/Linux platform, it does not have access to those True Type fonts, as only one font is shipped with the Strategy Product, which is Courier New. So if the specific font cannot be found, then "Courier New" will be used. But the 'Courier New' font does not support double byte characters (such as Chinese, Korean, Japanese, etc), which may cause those double byte characters not to display.
In this case, the Chinese font has been installed in the Linux Intelligence Server machine, but still cannot be retrieved. Because in Strategy 10.6 version, the new export engine, which uses the Linux fontconfig library to handle locating fonts to use while exporting, is used. So for additional fonts to be available, they must be installed through fontconfig. 
ACTION:
Install the Chinese font using fontconfig by following below steps:

  1. The location where fontconfig wants the font files to live is configurable, but the default is for each family of fonts to have their own subfolder in /usr/share/fonts/. Copy the font files.
  2. The fontconfig cache needs to be updated by running command: fc-cache /usr/share/fonts/
  3. Verify if the font is installed successfully using: fc-list | sort
  4. If the font is still not showing, restart the process for the new export engine.


Refer to Technical Document below (Point 4) on how to start the export engine service manually. 
KB323707: Common Troubleshooting questions for the new export engine in MicroStrategy 10.6 and higher versions KB438654


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Knowledge Article

Published:

December 21, 2017

Last Updated:

November 14, 2018