Summary

This article covers the restrictions regarding the output of characters when printing to PDF.

The Fountayn clinical research platform is able to work with all characters from the Unicode character set internally. However, one part of eClinical is the printing to PDF. Here there are restrictions regarding the output of characters and there is no single font that is able to display all Unicode characters.

It is reasonable to restrict the characacter set that can be specified for an application. Furthermore there might be situations, where it also makes sense to restrict different character sets for different tools of a single application.

Thus: eClinical supports character set restrictions on the application and the tool level. Patients that belong to the same tool need to share the same character set restriction.

This is how you can restrict character sets for eClinical:

• Define a name for a character set.
• Define subsets that should compose your character set. There is a limited number of predefined character subsets to be used.
• Specify which character set to use.

This is the list of available character subsets:

• ASCII
• ISO8859_1
• ISO8859_2
• ISO8859_3
• ISO8859_4
• ISO8859_5
• ISO8859_6
• ISO8859_7
• ISO8859_8
• ISO8859_9
• ISO8859_10
• ISO8859_11
• ISO8859_13
• ISO8859_14
• ISO8859_15
• ISO8859_16
• JIS0201
• JISRoman
• JISX0208_1997
• Katakana
• Latin1

This is how you define a charset name for your character set:
A list of character set names can be specified with the help of properties. Each property needs to have a prefix “defineCharset” and a numeric suffix starting at index 1. Thus the first character set can be defined with property “defineCharset1″, the second (if required) with property “defineCharset2″ and so on. As soon as no subsequent property is found, the list is considered to be complete. Thus you need to take care not to have any gaps in the list.

Example:

This is how you define the subsets that should be used for your character set:
Take the name of your character set, and append a dot. This is a prefix for a list of properties that specify a subset each. The list needs to start at index 1 and gaps are not supported.

Example:
With the “Japanese” character set name, you can specify different character subsets you want to allow:

This is how to specify which charset is to be used for your application:
In general the property “useCharset” needs to be set with the name of your character set.
Example:

It is possible to use different character sets per tool with the eClinical tool-specific properties.
Example:
When you want to use an ASCII charset for some tool, then you need the tool ID and a property:
Example (assume the tool ID is 19231):

given that you had defined such a charset with:

When you compile your trial with Trial Manager, then you can write additional output (check the box before compiling). This will include one PDF file per defined character set. Use this to verify that your character set restriction fits to the font and encoding that you have selected (settings ‘PDF.FONT.NAME’ and ‘PDF.FONT.ENCODING’). If you cannot see all characters in that charset PDF document, then different a font or encoding needs to be selected. Be aware that not all combinations of character subset will be printable with a single font.

There are situations, where you might be interested in the width of characters. When you specify the property “pdfCharsetBackground” with a value of “Yes”, then the PDF charset files will be created with a gray background visualizing the char width. For example the “Katakana” character subset includes half width characters.

Need more help?

Please visit the Fountayn Contact Information page.