Thursday 29 April 2010

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.

1 comment:

uknowme said...

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.
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