PDFlib 8 Windows COM/.NET Tutorial

5.4.5 Host Fonts on Windows and Mac OS X
On Mac and Windows systems PDFlib can access TrueType, OpenType, and PostScript
fonts which have been installed in the operating system. We refer to such fonts as host
fonts. Instead of manually configuring font files simply install the font in the system
(usually by dropping it into the appropriate directory), and PDFlib will happily use it.
When working with host fonts it is important to use the exact (case-sensitive) font
name. Since font names are crucial we mention some platform-specific methods for determining
font names below. More information on font names can be found in Section
5.1.3, »PostScript Type 1 Fonts«, page 118, and Section 5.1.1, »TrueType Fonts«, page 117.
Finding host font names on Windows. You can find the name of an installed font by
double-clicking the font file and taking note of the full font name which is displayed in
the window title (on Windows Vista/7/8) or the first line of the resulting window (on
Windows XP). Some fonts may have parts of their name localized according to the respective
Windows version in use. For example, the common font name portion Bold
may appear as the translated word Fett on a German system. In order to retrieve the
host font data from the Windows system you must use the translated form of the font
name in PDFlib (e.g. Arial Fett), or use font style names (see below). However, in order to
retrieve the font data directly from file you must use the generic (non-localized) form of
the font name (e.g. Arial Bold).
Note You can avoid this internationalization problem by appending font style names (e.g. »,Bold«,
see below) to the font name instead of using localized font name variants.
If you want to examine TrueType fonts in more detail take a look at Microsoft’s free
»font properties extension« 1 which will display many entries of the font’s TrueType tables
in human-readable form.
Windows font style names. When loading host fonts from the Windows operating
system PDFlib users have access to a feature provided by the Windows font selection
machinery: style names can be provided for the weight and slant, for example
font = p.load_font("Verdana,Bold", "unicode", "");
This will instruct Windows to search for a particular bold, italic, or other variation of the
base font. Depending on the available fonts Windows will select a font which most
closely resembles the requested style (it will not create a new font variation). The font
found by Windows may be different from the requested font, and the font name in the
generated PDF may be different from the requested name; PDFlib does not have any
control over Windows’ font selection. Font style names only work with host fonts, but
not for fonts configured via a font file.
The following keywords (separated from the font name with a comma) can be attached
to the base font name to specify the font weight:
none, thin, extralight, ultralight, light, normal, regular, medium,
semibold, demibold, bold, extrabold, ultrabold, heavy, black
1. See www.microsoft.com/typography/TrueTypeProperty21.mspx
136 Chapter 5: Font Handling (Edition for COM, .NET, and REALbasic)