[RndTbl] PDF Font help

[Gilles Detillieux]

Depending on how the PDF is generated, the required fonts may or may not 
be embedded.  Usually, the standard or base PostScript fonts are not 
embedded, because they're assumed to be on the target system's viewer or 
printer, but non-standard fonts more typically are embedded.  Systems 
that don't have the expected fonts should substitute with the closest 
match, which may or may not work well depending on how close the match 
is.  On Windows, the closest match to Helvetica is Arial, which is 
supposed to have compatible font metrics 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arial).  When it comes to generating a 
PDF, the system needs to have the font installed, and it needs to be a 
font that allows embedding, if you want the system to embed the font in 
the PDF.  For non-embedded fonts, I think it just needs the font 
metrics, which it should have for the base PostScript fonts.  Many PDF 
generators have an option for forcing the embedding of fonts, but that 
only works for fonts that are installed and embeddable.

I'm not familiar with Jasper and how it generates its PDF output, but 
perhaps you'll find some helpful tips on this page:
http://superuser.com/questions/39167/how-to-embed-arial-in-pdf-when-pdf-has-helvetica

On 09/03/2015 11:54 AM, Wyatt Zacharias wrote:
> I'm not all that familiar with the typography world, so I'm hoping 
> someone can lend some insight into a problem I'm having.
>
> We have pdf reports generated by Jasper which are created using the 
> Helvetica font. My main problem, is a report generated by Jasper on 
> Windows is slightly different than the one generated by Jasper on 
> Linux. I'm guessing this is an issue with something other than the 
> fonts, but to be sure, my question is does the system generating the 
> pdf need the font installed to use that font? I assume not, since I 
> can inspect the pdf with Acrobat, or the pdffonts command and it 
> confirms that the font used is Helvetica.
>
> My second question, is if the pdf is being created properly, would it 
> render improperly on a desktop that does not have Helvetica installed? 
> If I need to have the font installed, where can I find plain old 
> Helvetica? As I said, I'm not familiar with typography, but I can find 
> every variety out there of helvetica, except straight up "Helvetica".

-- 
Gilles R. Detillieux              E-mail: <grdetil at scrc.umanitoba.ca>
Spinal Cord Research Centre       WWW:    http://www.scrc.umanitoba.ca/
Dept. of Physiology and Pathophysiology, Faculty of Health Sciences,
Univ. of Manitoba  Winnipeg, MB  R3E 0J9  (Canada)