[reportlab-users] [PATCH] Add TTF Embedding Option

[Yoann Roman]

NOTE: I'm resending this since the list appears to have bounced it 
because of the attached PDFs.

I've obviously offended the PDF gods by even suggesting this :-). To 
respond to everyone's questions...


>From Robin...

> my earlier suspicions are proved correct. Using more than the first 

> subset causes an error

>

> [snip]

> 

> There may be some way to use unicode as the output format, but I don't 

> know enough about how adobe reader works with these non-embedded 

> system fonts to answer for sure. I don't think we should let this 

> patch go till we can get at least this primitive test to work.


I ran similar tests with Acrobat, and it's doing more behind the scenes 
than it lets on. It switches to embedded subsets, regardless of the 
"Never Embed" list, if any non-CP1252 characters are used and for 
certain CP1252 characters. The latter seems to kick in at the 181 range 
but not for all 181 to 255 code points.

I took another stab at my patch and got your test to pass. The trick was 
to return CP1252 codes in splitString instead of UTF-8 and to re-enable 
embedding if a CP1252 conversion wasn't possible. I also had to change 
addObjects to include the widths of all CP1252 characters used in a 
single subset, re-enable embedding if there was more than one subset, 
and specify the WinAnsiEncoding when not embedding.

What I didn't like about it, though, is that, if the CP1252 conversion 
failed halfway through, there was no way to cleanly handle it. I could 
keep embedding info in the TTFont but there would be no way to go back 
and revert those CP1252 code points to UTF-8 code points.

So I'm retracting my patch; it was an interesting exercise :-).


>From Henning...

> can you explain why you cannot follow the earlier recommendation to 

> use the built-in fonts (Helvetica, ...) instead?


That's what I'll end up doing. I assume the only effect that would have 
is with Mac users that did have Arial.


>From Tim...

> Are you using compression when you create your PDFs?  That makes a big

> difference in size.


I am. The difference is still pretty large, though. Examples attached 
[stripped]. Acrobat-Arial.pdf [43KB] and ReportLab-Arial.pdf [129KB] are 
the "same" document using all four variants of Arial, embedded. I'm on 
Acrobat 9 but had it generate a 1.3 PDF. ReportLab-Arial-Small.pdf 
[45KB] was with setting asciiReadable to 0; it's much smaller although 
I'm not sure I understand all the implications.

-- 
Yoann Roman