iTextSharp international text

The key for proper display of alternate characters sets (Russian, Chinese, Japanese, etc.) is to use IDENTITY_H encoding when creating the BaseFont.

Dim bfR As iTextSharp.text.pdf.BaseFont
  bfR = iTextSharp.text.pdf.BaseFont.CreateFont("MyFavoriteFont.ttf", iTextSharp.text.pdf.BaseFont.IDENTITY_H, iTextSharp.text.pdf.BaseFont.EMBEDDED)

IDENTITY_H provides unicode support for your chosen font, so you should be able to display pretty much any character. I’ve used it for Russian, Greek, and all the different European language letters.

EDIT – 2013-May-28

This also works for v5.0.2 of iTextSharp.

EDIT – 2015-June-23

Given below is a complete code sample (in C#):

private void CreatePdf()
{
  string testText = "đĔĐěÇøç";
  string tmpFile = @"C:\test.pdf";
  string myFont = @"C:\<<valid path to the font you want>>\verdana.ttf";
  iTextSharp.text.Rectangle pgeSize = new iTextSharp.text.Rectangle(595, 792);
  iTextSharp.text.Document doc = new iTextSharp.text.Document(pgeSize, 10, 10, 10, 10);
  iTextSharp.text.pdf.PdfWriter wrtr;
  wrtr = iTextSharp.text.pdf.PdfWriter.GetInstance(doc,
      new System.IO.FileStream(tmpFile, System.IO.FileMode.Create));
  doc.Open();
  doc.NewPage();
  iTextSharp.text.pdf.BaseFont bfR;
  bfR = iTextSharp.text.pdf.BaseFont.CreateFont(myFont,
    iTextSharp.text.pdf.BaseFont.IDENTITY_H,
    iTextSharp.text.pdf.BaseFont.EMBEDDED);

  iTextSharp.text.BaseColor clrBlack = 
      new iTextSharp.text.BaseColor(0, 0, 0);
  iTextSharp.text.Font fntHead =
      new iTextSharp.text.Font(bfR, 12, iTextSharp.text.Font.NORMAL, clrBlack);

  iTextSharp.text.Paragraph pgr = 
      new iTextSharp.text.Paragraph(testText, fntHead);
  doc.Add(pgr);
  doc.Close();
}

This is a screenshot of the pdf file that is created:

An important point to remember is that if the font you have chosen does not support the characters you are trying to send to the pdf file, nothing you do in iTextSharp is going to change that. Verdana nicely displays the characters from all the European fonts I know of.
Other fonts may not be able to display as many characters.