How to allow a Unicode subscript symbol in a PDF without using setTextRise()?

Is there a setting to change the encoding/font of the text to UTF-8, so that it allows all the Unicode symbols?

I have been trying to create PDF files using iText. I have found that Superscript (0,4,5,6,7,8,9) and Subscript (0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9) are not allowed in the default font. Only Superscript 1,2,3 are allowed in the default setting. A String in my PDF contains subscript and superscript characters, is there a way I can display them in PDF?

I searched and found that:

the setTextRise() method is used to change the displacement of the text with respect to the current line, I cannot use it as I don't know which characters are to super/sub scripted.
Is there a setting to change the encoding/font of the text to UTF-8, so that it allows all the Unicode symbols?

Or some other way, because i have to show chemical symbols like H?SO?, O? etc.

Posted on StackOverflow on Jul 16, 2014 by nexus

Please take a look at the SubSuperScript example I wrote in answer to your question. I'm writing H?SO? like this:

PdfFont f = PdfFontFactory.createFont(FONT, PdfEncodings.IDENTITY_H);
Paragraph p = new Paragraph("H\u2082SO\u2074").setFont(f).setFontSize(10);
doc.add(p);

I've found the values of the specific characters on Wikipedia.

As you can see, iText is perfectly capable to show the special characters written in subscript or superscript. The main problem I had when I wrote this example was finding a font that supported the specific glyphs. That's what I explained in my earlier comment. I ended up using a font called "Cardo Regular".

Click this link if you want to see how to answer this question in iText 5.