Scott Moore wrote:
There's a debate raging in our company right now about the use of Arial and
Helvetica in FOP produced PDF. After careful examination of both fonts, I
can see absolutely no difference, even though Helvetica has minor but
distinguishable differences from Arial.
I'm using the information on this website to distinguish between the two
fonts: http://www.ms-studio.com/articlesarialsid.html
It appears to me that Helvetica is actually Arial in the PDF. Even when I
have Acrobat Reader 5.0 list the fonts, it says Helvetica maps to ArialMT.
So, my question is: is this a problem with FOP or Acrobat Reader? Is
Helvetica something that Acrobat Reader renders or did FOP use Arial for the
Helvetica font? I'm not exactly sure how fonts work in PDF, but I've read
Helvetica comes standard with PDF. I find it strange that Helvetica is
mapping to Arial though.
AFAIK the standard fonts supported by the Adobe tools (and the
PDF format) include Arial, but not Helvetica. The glyphs rendered
for FOP "Helvetica" are certainly taken from Arial. I'm not sure
whether the font metrics used by FOP is indeed generated from an
Helvetica font, or whether it is actually an Arial font, with the
name being some historic relict (AFAIK early PDF specs had
Helvetica instead of arial in them).
J.Pietschmann
