More flexibility configuring PDF font embedding

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Simon Dismore
Posts: 454
Joined: Thu Nov 16, 2006 1:29 pm
Location: London, UK

More flexibility configuring PDF font embedding

Unread post by Simon Dismore »

This is about enabling a couple of features in the PDF publishing component (wPDF).

Background:
  • Configuration > Publishing Options > Adobe PDF > Font Embedding allows the author to select how fonts will be embedded in PDFs.
  • One option is to convert all the fonts in the document from their native format into postscript type 3 shapes which are embedded in the output.
  • Type 3 has the advantage that the vector shape is determined at publishing time, so nothing can go wrong when the PDF is viewed. For example, it's a workaround for the Latin Capital Letter Reversed E problem. It's also great for mixed Latin/Asian documents, and can be useful for ensuring high quality rendering of display fonts (as explained here).
  • However, type 3 fonts aren't good for body text, as discussed in Type 3 fonts less sharp?
  • Furthermore, in the current H&M 7.1.0 implementation of type 3, the list of excluded fonts is ignored, so all fonts are converted to type 3 and embedded even if they are common fonts that exist (or have substitutes) on destination devices.
Proposals:
  1. In the three Truetype embedding modes, allow the author to specify which fonts should be converted to type 3 before embedding (i.e. allow configuration of wPDF's Type3Fonts property).
  2. Support wPDF's ExcludedFonts property in the Type3 and the two Embed Subset modes.
The result might be something like...
[mockup] Ability to selectively embed as type 3.png
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