How can I preserve non-English characters in PDF

To export non-Western characters, such as CJK (Chinese/Japanese/Korean), Cyrillic, Indian, etc. to PDF files correctly you will need to set the Embed all fonts option to Yes in your PDF Settings:

Exporting Mixed Fonts

When there is a document with mixture of English and Chinese / Japanese / Arabic / etc.. fonts, Lotus Notes exports all those fonts as plain "Arial" font.

SWING Seascape gets the Lotus Notes document export in raw DXL and processes paragraphs one by one. In this process Seascape looks for paragraph text and its font.

Paragraph text comes LMBCS (Lotus Multi Byte Character Set) encoded. LMBCS provides region code which tells Seascape what type of string it's working with.

If there is a mixed text in the document, Seascape gets (from Lotus Notes) that only "Arial" font is used in entire document.

The default "Arial" font does not contain all glyphs required to show international symbols in pdf document. To overcome this issue Seascape uses Adobe recommended fonts which are chosen by LMBCS region.

These fonts are not being embedded by default as they are 15MB+ in size, so that the resulting PDF documents will be 15MB+ in size which is not optimal.

Converting Thai symbols

To convert documents with Thai symbols, one of the required fonts must be installed. Learn more:

Thai symbols not shown in PDF document