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Adding new fonts and encoding support
This tutorial explains how to use TrueType or Type1 fonts so that you are not
limited to the standard fonts any more. The other interest is that you can choose
the font encoding, which allows you to use other languages than the Western ones
(the standard fonts having too few available characters).
There are two ways to use a new font: embedding it in the PDF or not. When a font
is not embedded, it is sought in the system. The advantage is that the PDF file
is lighter; on the other hand, if it is not available, a substitution font is
used. So it is preferable to ensure that the needed font is installed on the client
systems. If the file is to be viewed by a large audience, it is better to embed.
Adding a new font requires three steps for TrueTypes:
- Generation of the metric file (.afm)
- Generation of the font definition file (.php)
- Declaration of the font in the script
For Type1, the first one is theoretically not necessary because the AFM file is
usually shipped with the font. In case you have only a metric file in PFM format,
use the convertor available here.
Generation of the metric fileThe first step for a TrueType consists in generating
the AFM file. A utility exists to do this task: ttf2pt1.
The Windows binary is available here.
The command line to use is the following:
For example, for Comic Sans MS Regular:
| ttf2pt1 -a c:\windows\fonts\comic.ttf comic |
Two files are created; the one we are interested in is comic.afm. Generation of
the font definition fileThe second step consists in generating a PHP file containing
all the information needed by FPDF; in addition, the font file is compressed.
To do this, a helper script is provided in the font/makefont/ directory of the
package: makefont.php. It contains the following function:
MakeFont(string fontfile, string afmfile [, string enc [,
array patch [, string type]]])
fontfile Path to the .ttf or .pfb file. afmfile Path to the .afm
file. enc Name of the encoding to use. Default value: cp1252. patch
Optional modification of the encoding. Empty by default. type Type of the
font (TrueType or Type1). Default value: TrueType.
The first parameter is the name of the font file. The extension must be either
.ttf or .pfb and determines the font type. If you own a Type1 font in ASCII format
(.pfa), you can convert it to binary format with t1utils.
If you don't want to embed the font, pass an empty string. In this case, type
is given by the type parameter.
Note: in the case of a font with the same name as a standard one, for instance
arial.ttf, it is mandatory to embed. If you don't, Acrobat will use its own font.
The AFM file is the one previously generated.
The encoding defines the association between a code (from 0 to 255) and a character.
The first 128 are fixed and correspond to ASCII; the following are variable. The
encodings are stored in .map files. Those available are:
- cp1250 (Central Europe)
- cp1251 (Cyrillic)
- cp1252 (Western Europe)
- cp1253 (Greek)
- cp1254 (Turkish)
- cp1255 (Hebrew)
- cp1257 (Baltic)
- cp1258 (Vietnamese)
- cp874 (Thai)
- ISO-8859-1 (Western Europe)
- ISO-8859-2 (Central Europe)
- ISO-8859-4 (Baltic)
- ISO-8859-5 (Cyrillic)
- ISO-8859-7 (Greek)
- ISO-8859-9 (Turkish)
- ISO-8859-11 (Thai)
- ISO-8859-15 (Western Europe)
- ISO-8859-16 (Central Europe)
- KOI8-R (Russian)
- KOI8-U (Ukrainian)
Of course, the font must contain the characters corresponding to the chosen encoding.
In the particular case of a symbolic font (that is to say which does not contain
letters, such as Symbol or ZapfDingbats), pass an empty string.
The encodings which begin with cp are those used by Windows; Linux systems usually
use ISO.
Remark: the standard fonts use cp1252.
The fourth parameter gives the possibility to alter the encoding. Sometimes you
may want to add some characters. For instance, ISO-8859-1 does not contain the
euro symbol. To add it at position 164, pass array(164=>'Euro').
The last parameter is used to give the type of the font in case it is not embedded
(that is to say the first parameter is empty).
After you have called the function (create a new file for this and include makefont.php,
or simply add the call directly inside), a .php file is created, with the same
name as the .afm one. You may rename it if you wish. If the case of embedding,
the font file is compressed and gives a second file with .z as extension (except
if the compression function is not available, it requires Zlib). You may rename
it too, but in this case you have to alter the variable $file in the .php file
accordingly.
Example:
| MakeFont('c:\\windows\\fonts\\comic.ttf','comic.afm','cp1252'); |
which gives the files comic.php and comic.z.
Then you have to copy the generated file(s) either in the directory of the script
which will use the font, or in the directory given by FPDF_FONTPATH if the constant
is defined. If the font file could not be compressed, copy the .ttf or .pfb instead
of the .z. Declaration of the font in the scriptThe last step is the most simple.
You just need to call the AddFont()
method. For instance:
| $pdf->AddFont('Comic','','comic.php'); |
or simply:
And the font is now available (in regular and underlined styles), usable like
the others. If we had worked with Comic Sans MS Bold (comicbd.ttf), we would have
put:
| $pdf->AddFont('Comic','B','comicbd.php'); |
ExampleLet's now see a small complete example. The font used is Calligrapher,
available at www.abstractfonts.com
(a site offering numerous free TrueType fonts). The first step is the generation
of the AFM file:
| ttf2pt1 -a calligra.ttf calligra |
which gives calligra.afm (and calligra.t1a that we can delete). Then we generate
the definition file:
<?php
require('../font/makefont/makefont.php');
MakeFont('calligra.ttf','calligra.afm');
?> |
The function call gives the following report:
Warning: character Euro is missing
Warning: character Zcaron is missing
Warning: character zcaron is missing
Warning: character eth is missing
Font file compressed (calligra.z)
Font definition file generated (calligra.php)
The euro character is not present in the font (it is too old). Three other characters
are missing too, but we are not interested in them anyway.
We can now copy the two files in the font directory and write the script:
<?php
define('FPDF_FONTPATH','font/');
require('fpdf.php');
$pdf=new FPDF();
$pdf->AddFont('Calligrapher','','calligra.php');
$pdf->AddPage();
$pdf->SetFont('Calligrapher','',35);
$pdf->Cell(0,10,'Enjoy new fonts with FPDF!');
$pdf->Output();
?> |
[Demo]
About the euro symbolThe euro character is not present in all encodings, and is
not always placed at the same position:
| Encoding |
Position |
| cp1250 |
128
|
| cp1251 |
136
|
| cp1252 |
128
|
| cp1253 |
128
|
| cp1254 |
128
|
| cp1255 |
128
|
| cp1257 |
128
|
| cp1258 |
128
|
| cp874 |
128
|
| ISO-8859-1 |
absent
|
| ISO-8859-2 |
absent
|
| ISO-8859-4 |
absent
|
| ISO-8859-5 |
absent
|
| ISO-8859-7 |
absent
|
| ISO-8859-9 |
absent
|
| ISO-8859-11 |
absent
|
| ISO-8859-15 |
164
|
| ISO-8859-16 |
164
|
| KOI8-R |
absent
|
| KOI8-U |
absent
|
ISO-8859-1 is widespread but does not include the euro sign. If you need it, the
simplest thing to do is using cp1252 or ISO-8859-15 instead, which are nearly
identical but contain the precious symbol.
As for ISO-8859-2, it is possible to use ISO-8859-16 instead, but it contains
many differences. It is therefore simpler to patch the encoding to add the symbol
to it, as explained above. The same is true for the other encodings. Font synthesis
under WindowsWhen a TrueType font is not available in a given style, Windows is
able to synthesize it from the regular version. For instance, there is no Comic
Sans MS Italic, but it can be built from Comic Sans MS Regular. This feature can
be used in a PDF file, but unfortunately requires that the regular font be present
in the system (you must not embed it). Here is how to do it:
- Generate the definition file for the regular font without embedding (you
may rename it to reflect the desired style)
- Open it and append to the variable $name a comma followed by the desired
style (Italic, Bold or BoldItalic)
For instance, for the file comici.php:
| $name='ComicSansMS,Italic'; |
It can then be used normally:
| $pdf->AddFont('Comic','I','comici.php'); |
Reducing the size of TrueType fontsFont files are often quite voluminous (more
than 100, even 200KB); this is due to the fact that they contain the characters
corresponding to many encodings. Zlib compression reduces them but they remain
fairly big. A technique exists to reduce them further. It consists in converting
the font to the Type1 format with ttf2pt1 by specifying the encoding you are interested
in; all other characters will be discarded.
For instance, the arial.ttf font shipped with Windows 98 is 267KB (it contains
1296 characters). After compression it gives 147. Let's convert it to Type1 by
keeping only cp1250 characters:
| ttf2pt1 -b -L cp1250.map c:\windows\fonts\arial.ttf arial |
The .map files are located in the font/makefont/ directory of the package. The
command produces arial.pfb and arial.afm. The arial.pfb file is only 35KB, and
30KB after compression.
It is possible to go even further. If you are interested only by a subset of the
encoding (you probably don't need all 217 characters), you can open the .map file
and remove the lines you are not interested in. This will reduce the file size
accordingly.
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