It's frustrating that the PDF Export feature offered in Confluence is basically broken for international users at the moment as the default fonts that are used do not have non-latin characters.

As a workaround, one can upload their own custom font that has the desired character set (Creating PDF in Another Language), however:

• Only one font face is supported (see CONF-30779)
• Only one font style is supported (e.g. bold, italic, monospace, see CONF-10048)
• OnDemand users can't even do it themselves and need to ask support staff to upload the custom font for them
• In any way it's quite a bit of extra work to do

As you can see, even the currently known workarounds (which can be pretty time-consuming to execute) have serious limitations because, clearly, most technical documents make use of different font styles (including monospace for code inserts) and font faces (at least two typefaces are normally used in a document - one for headings and another for body text).

Then, even if embedding multiple fonts and font styles is supported, it's likely that the user would have to manually edit the PDF Stylesheet to configure different fonts/styles for different elements on the page (headings, body text, inline code, code blocks, quotes, etc.) to acually make efficient use of the new fonts and make the documents look decent.

Another concern with substituting fonts for PDF export and applying appropriate stylesheets to use them would be that the result PDF documents would very likely look different from their screen versions as the PDF stylesheet is of course used only for PDFs. Maybe it would be better to allow injecting fonts and custom stylesheets not just for export but for normal display of pages? But that's another topic.

To sum up, the functionality of embedding custom fonts and applying custom styles for PDF (and Word?) export feels like a hack and is not intended to be used extensively. Further developing that functionality without revisiting it completely looks like a road to nowhere to me.

For now, please at least support international characters in PDF export out of the box!

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All the (possibly) related discussions I've found so far that may need to be updated/revisited/linked to this one:

• CONF-26908: International characters in code macros dissapear after exporting page as PDF
• CONF-28348: Administrators are unable to upload font files for PDF Export anymore
• Atlassian Answers: International characters and PDF export
• Documentation: Creating PDF in Another Language (may need to be updated)