[reportlab-users] Disable TTF Embedding

Yoann Roman yroman-reportlab at altalang.com
Wed Oct 15 10:12:58 EDT 2008


Andy Robinson wrote...

> But for any other fonts, you are supposed to embed the font.

> Otherwise there is no way for Adobe Reader or other viewers to

> display it.


I looked into Acrobat 9's default settings, and it *does* embed subsets
of all fonts except for Arial, Arial Black, Arial Narrow, Century
Gothic, Courier New, Georgia, Impact, Lucida Console, Tahoma, Times New
Roman, Trebuchet, and Verdana. It has all those on a "never embed" list
for its "Standard" profile.

The best I can find in terms of reasoning is this:
http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=328520
http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=326402

I'm guessing Adobe decided to reduce everyday PDF sizes by assuming
that users would always have those fonts (at least on Windows).


> Why do you want to use a custom font, but not embed it?


I'm still working on replacing an Access reporting solution that used
Acrobat with ReportLab. The issue I ran into is that the RL PDFs are
much larger because all variants of Arial (e.g., bold, bold italic) are
embedded instead of Acrobat's approach.

I'm certainly not suggesting to make this the default and agree that
custom fonts should be embedded, but I'd like to have the option in
this particular case.

Thanks,

--
Yoann Roman



More information about the reportlab-users mailing list