Issue with bullets in pdf on Mac

[AlexCo]

I’m creating a pdf document using aspose words for Java, using the insertHtml function that happens to have bulleted lists in them.

When I create a word document everything seems fine, as well as creating a pdf on windows.

However when I do the same thing on my Mac, it doesn’t display the bullet, it displays the rectangle as if the symbol is missing from the font.

I have tried manually adding fonts to my Mac, listening to make sure it’s not substituting fonts within aspose, as well as a few other solutions I’ve seen floating around the forum. Nothing I’ve done has made the bullets actually show.

[alexey.noskov]

@AlexCo It looks like a known peculiarity. Windows “Symbol” font is a symbolic font (like “Webdings”, “Wingdings”, etc.) which uses Unicode PUA. Provided Mac “Symbol” font on the other hand is a proper Unicode font (for example Greek characters are in the U+0370…U+03FF Greek and Coptic block). So these fonts are incompatible and Mac “Symbol” font cannot be used instead of Windows “Symbol” without additional actions. In this particular case you have to change the bullet codepoint from PUA U+F0B7 (or U+00B7 which also can be used in MW for symbolic fonts) to the U+2022 in the document to use the Mac “Symbol” font. See the following code for example:

Document doc = new Document("C:\\Temp\\in.docx");

for (com.aspose.words.List lst : doc.getLists())
{
    for (com.aspose.words.ListLevel level : lst.getListLevels())
    {
        if (level.getFont().getName() == "Symbol" && level.getNumberFormat() == "\uF0B7")
        {
            level.setNumberFormat("\u2022");
        }
    }
}

doc.save("C:\\Temp\\out.pdf");