Hi Maruan Java provides access to platform fonts via AWT and does not reveal the paths to the fonts which it finds, so it is not practical to use platform fonts without using AWT. There have also been a number of problems with some unix platforms which lack some of the standard 14 fonts or which ship with poor quality substitutes. Ideally, PDFBox should produce the same result irrespective of which platform it is running on, much like Adobe Reader (excluding any missing embedded fonts, of course).
I’ve had poor experiences in the past with the Nimbus family of fonts from URW++ but there are numerous factors (kerning, hinting, metrics, TTF vs Type 1) which may have changed since then. We should check out how well these fonts compare with the standard 14 used by Adobe, in particular whether or not the metrics actually match (I know that it is claimed that they do). -- John On 4 Mar 2014, at 05:48, Maruan Sahyoun <sahy...@fileaffairs.de> wrote: > Hi John, > > what about just using the platform fonts? If not then Latex uses the URW++ > fonts which were made available under the http://www.latex-project.org/lppl > license. (same fonts are used by Ghostscript). Could check if the license is > fine with ours. > > BR > Maruan Sahyoun > > Am 03.03.2014 um 21:20 schrieb John Hewson <j...@jahewson.com>: > >> Hi All >> >> I wanted to bring PDFBOX-1959 to the attention of the mailing list. PDFBox >> is ready to leave AWT font rendering behind as the JDKs rendering has proven >> to be buggy and we now have our own renderers for all font types in 2.0.0. >> >> Before we can do this we need to ship a set of standard 14 fonts with PDFBox >> as currently the system fonts are being used via AWT. We also need to >> provide a mechanism for the user to supply their own external fonts for >> cases where embedded fonts are missing. >> >> The main question is, what fonts should we ship? Some of the "free" fonts >> I've seen render very poorly, any suggestions? Furthermore, are there fonts >> under more restrictive licenses which we could ship? Apache does allow for >> such files to be part of a project under certain conditions. >> >> Also: Adobe has some font packs, e.g. Japanese, which we could point users >> towards. >> >> Cheers >> >> -- John >
