Croatian encoding for BytesIO Python

Question

So I made a Python program that will add text to a PDF template but I have a problem with showing chars like č,ć,š,ž,đ etc.

That text is firstly put on canvas:

packet = io.BytesIO()
can = canvas.Canvas(packet, pagesize=A4)

then you put the packet into a new PDF:

can.drawString(100, 100, "Kopačka")
    can.save()    
    packet.seek(0)  
    new_pdf = PdfFileReader(packet)

and after that I merged the the empty PDF template and the new PDF with the critical text.

The problem is that the special diacritic chars are showing as black boxes like this: ⬛

I tried adding UTF-8 encoding to the definition function:

def __init__(self, e='utf-8')

and in the drawString function like this:

can.drawString(100, 100, "Kopačka".encode('utf-8'))

but it's still not showing correctly.

Is there a way to show those special characters in some other way?

Answer 1

Scripts that use UTF-8 encoding should start with this comment:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

Also you can setup usage of utf-8 this way:

import sys
reload(sys)
sys.setdefaultencoding('utf-8')

In your script unicode strings can be defined with 'u' prefix

can.drawString(100, 100, u"Kopačka")

Answer 2

So I found out the solution:

I added the comment as @Aleksey said: # -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

And I changed the font from Arial to Calibri as @usr2564301 suggested like this:

First, imported modules:

from reportlab.pdfbase import pdfmetrics
from reportlab.pdfbase.ttfonts import TTFont

Then I downloaded Calibri Regualr.ttf in the folder and registered it in the app:

pdfmetrics.registerFont(TTFont('Calibri', 'Calibri Regular.ttf'))

And then changed the font in the canvas:

can.setFont("Calibri", 11)

Other than that, I left the UTF-8 encoding in the definition function and the drawString function.

Thank you all for the help!