Inasmuch as I couldn’t get a ✓, tick, check, ✓, ✓, U+2713, CHECK MARK, call it what you will, into PDF on Ubuntu 8.04 with Antenna House V5, I had to find a font with it and tell the formatter where to find the font.
Firefox could display the character, so I knew it had to be there somewhere. After a bit of hunting through /usr/share/fonts using FontForge, I found the OpenSymbol font, originally part of OpenOffice but now separately installable as the ttf-opensymbol package.
The first step in acquainting any XSL formatter with the font’s use is including the font name in a font-family value. Specifying font-family on fo:root sets the default for the document:
<fo:root font-family="Georgia, opensymbol" font-selection-strategy="character-by-character">
I used to have symbol, etc., in that list for use on Windows, but, sadly, I haven’t found a way to get a ✓ into PDF other than also installing the OpenSymbol font there. Specifying font-selection-strategy as character-by-character is just making sure the formatter will swap fonts if the first font doesn’t have a glyph.
How the XSL formatter finds the font is different for different formatters. The second, Antenna House-specific step is adding /usr/share/fonts/truetype/openoffice, which contains the font file, to the config file at /usr/AHFormatterV5/etc/font-config.xml:
<font-config> <!--otf-metrics-mode mode="typographic"/--> <!-- add your font folder here --> <!-- font-folder path="/home/user-name/fonts" --> <!-- /font-folder --> <font-folder path="/usr/AHFormatterV5_64/fonts"> <glyph-list file="ZapfDingbats-glyphname.txt" afm="ZapfDingbats.afm"/> </font-folder> <font-folder path="/usr/share/fonts/truetype/msttcorefonts"/> <font-folder path="/usr/share/fonts/truetype/openoffice"/> </font-config>
And I get a tick out of U(buntu):
