[RndTbl] PDF Font help

[Wyatt Zacharias]

After consulting the manual of pdffonts, I can say that the font is not
being emedded, as shown by the output below, in the "emb" column.

[root at tslx99]/shared/pdf#> pdffonts QE1-473.pdf
name                                 type              emb sub uni object ID
------------------------------------ ----------------- --- --- --- ---------
Helvetica                            Type 1            no  no  no       2  0
Helvetica-Bold                       Type 1            no  no  no       3  0
Helvetica-Oblique                    Type 1            no  no  no       4  0

So, assuming Jasper can be made to embed a font in a generated pdf, how do
I get my hands on those three fonts? (Obviously they have to be purchased
that's not the issue)
Everywhere I look, including linotype.com, I cannot seem to find straight
"Helvetica". Is there no such thing as "Helvetica" and I should actually be
looking for something else?

--
Wyatt Zacharias


On Mon, Mar 9, 2015 at 12:55 PM, Gilles Detillieux <
grdetil at scrc.umanitoba.ca> wrote:

> 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)
>
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