What are some best practices for handling encoding issues when generating PDFs with TCPDF in PHP?
When generating PDFs with TCPDF in PHP, it is important to handle encoding issues properly to ensure that text displays correctly in the PDF. One common issue is when special characters or non-ASCII characters are not displayed correctly in the PDF. To solve this problem, you can set the encoding of the TCPDF object to UTF-8 and use functions like utf8_encode() to encode strings before adding them to the PDF.
// Create a new TCPDF object
$pdf = new TCPDF('P', 'mm', 'A4', true, 'UTF-8', false);
// Set the font for the PDF
$pdf->SetFont('helvetica', '', 12);
// Encode the string using utf8_encode() before adding it to the PDF
$text = utf8_encode("Special characters like é, ü, and ñ will display correctly in the PDF.");
// Add the encoded text to the PDF
$pdf->Cell(0, 10, $text, 0, 1, 'L');
// Output the PDF
$pdf->Output('example.pdf', 'I');