PoDoFo Base 14 Font support

Today has seen a major contribution to the PoDoFo PDF library.

I integrated a patch by Ian Curington and his developers, which brings support for using the base 14 fonts in PDF files. What are the base 14 fonts, you might ask?

Every PDF viewer has to ship with these 14 fonts, therefore one can achieve much smaller file sizes, as these particular 14 fonts do not have to be embedded into the PDF. Still, the PDF is displayed the same on every system (should be displayed ...), as every PDF viewer has the same font metrics for these fonts. Among the base 14 fonts are Helvetica, Times, Courier and Symbol.

This contribution makes the base 14 fonts available to everyone creating PDFs using PoDoFo. As the base 14 fonts are automatically used, whenever you request a PdfFont like Helvetica, this should result in much smaller file sizes for PDFs created with PoDoFo, which only use these fonts. An example which does also compare one of the base 14 fonts (Helvetica) to a TrueType font (Arial) is also provided. Okular has some problem displaying the symbol fonts, which I have yet to investigate.

If you would like to try the change, please grab the latest PoDoFo from SVN. The change is not included in the latest 0.8.0 release.

A web-radio plasmoid for your desktop

Since I am in Limerick, Ireland, I started to listen quite a lot to RTÉ 2XM, which is a great web-radio station of the public broadcasting service in Ireland (Click for webstream).

RTÉ has a quite nice applet for the Windows Vista or Windows 7 sidebar. Unfortunately, the do not yet offer one for KDE and Plasma. Instead of waiting for the applet, I wrote a little web-radio applet by myself yesterday.



The plamoid has a simple list of radio stations and a play and a stop button. Easy, isn't it? Of course you can configure the list of stations. If you download and install it, it comes preconfigured with all the RTÉ stations and my favourite Austrian station FM4.



You can download the plasmoid from here: http://krename.sourceforge.net/data/plasmaradio-0.1.tar.gz.

To install the plasmoid, follow the following steps after downloading it:

tar xvfz plasmaradio-0.1.tar.gz
cd plasmaradio-0.1
mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$KDEDIRS ..
make
make install


I would be happy to receive some feedback on this little piece of code. By the way, I think it really shows what great stuff can be done in so little time using the KDE4 API.