Re: [Devel] PDF Font embedding

[Leonard Rosenthol]

At 02:58 AM 3/21/2004, Salman Khilji wrote:
> "I wrote for my former employer the code for using FreeType to get the
> information necessary to embed fonts in PDF files.  I've been meaning to
> rewrite it and add it to the FreeType distro"
>
> I was wondering if this work is available as this is precisely what I would
> like to do.

        I am aware of at least two existing open source projects that use 
FT as part of the PDF generation code, as well as many other commercial 
solutions.  However, in both cases, they only perform full embedding of the 
fonts and not subsetting.

        In fact, I just completed a new PDF "font engine" myself PARTIALLY 
based on FT...The reason for partially is the comment above - FT doesn't 
provide enough information to the caller to be able to do font subsetting 
:(.   So in my case, I use FT to load fonts, get metrics, get outlines (for 
text->outline conversion), and rendering - BUT I also have a completely 
different code path for when I do subsetting.  (which is actually kind of 
funny, since after the font data is subset, the subset font goes back into 
FT for embedding ;).


> I am working on an open source C++ based PDF library (similar to iText Java
> PDF library).

        As the official commercial licensor of iText - I'd LOVE to see a 
C++ port of iText!!!  Please let me/us know of the URL for your project 
when it gets to that point...And I'd be happy to help out.


> While I thought about "stealing" the font parsing,/subsetting code from iText
> and simply porting it to C++, I think using FreeType may be better.

        If all you want to do is get enough font information for text 
layout and font embedding/subsetting - Paulo's code in iText is top 
notch!  I've ported parts of it myself for use in my project.

        However, there is nothing in iText today for rendering or outline 
retrieval - it doesn't deal with those pieces of the font data.  So if you 
want/need those - you'll want FT!


Leonard
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Leonard Rosenthol                            <mailto:address@hidden>
Chief Technical Officer                      <http://www.pdfsages.com>
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