Hi,

since many years, I'm using PHP (currently 7.4) and the (self-
compiled) Haru extension to produce PDF invoices on my server.

Internally, Haru seems to use Ghostscript, because:

- up to app-text/ghostscript-gpl-9.55.0-r2, when you look at the
PDF "properties" and then the "fonts" tab, there is "Courier",
"Helvetica" and "Helvetica-BoldOblique" - just as requested in
my PHP script like
$myPdf=new HaruDoc();
[...some page settings...]
$myFont=$myPdf->getFont('Courier', 'WinAnsiEncoding');

- from app-text/ghostscript-gpl-9.56.1-r3 on, everything looks like
before, but in the "properties/fonts" tab of the resulting PDF,
the fonts are now "NimbusMonoPS-Regular", "NimbusSands-BoldItalic"
and "NimbusSans-Regular".

I have already found this "translation" in the file /usr/share/ghostscript/9.56.1/Resource/Init/Fontmap.GS but there is
obviously no relevant difference in that file between 9.55 and 9.56.

Some of my customers now seem to have trouble if the fonts in the
PDF properties are named "Nimbus" instead of "Courier" - they just
see some hieroglyphics when displaying the PDF.

Any idea that's going wrong here?

Thanks in advance,

-Matt

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On Monday, 7 November 2022 11:56:34 GMT Matthias Hanft wrote:

Hi,

since many years, I'm using PHP (currently 7.4) and the (self-
compiled) Haru extension to produce PDF invoices on my server.

Internally, Haru seems to use Ghostscript, because:

- up to app-text/ghostscript-gpl-9.55.0-r2, when you look at the
PDF "properties" and then the "fonts" tab, there is "Courier",
"Helvetica" and "Helvetica-BoldOblique" - just as requested in
my PHP script like
$myPdf=new HaruDoc();
[...some page settings...]
$myFont=$myPdf->getFont('Courier', 'WinAnsiEncoding');

- from app-text/ghostscript-gpl-9.56.1-r3 on, everything looks like
before, but in the "properties/fonts" tab of the resulting PDF,
the fonts are now "NimbusMonoPS-Regular", "NimbusSands-BoldItalic"
and "NimbusSans-Regular".

I have already found this "translation" in the file /usr/share/ghostscript/9.56.1/Resource/Init/Fontmap.GS but there is
obviously no relevant difference in that file between 9.55 and 9.56.

Some of my customers now seem to have trouble if the fonts in the
PDF properties are named "Nimbus" instead of "Courier" - they just
see some hieroglyphics when displaying the PDF.

Any idea that's going wrong here?

Thanks in advance,

-Matt

If your customers do not have Nimbus fonts available on their OS/PDF viewer, the viewer application will proceed using font substitution. It will use whichever font family it thinks is the closest match, I would assume
Helvetica. Their application appears to get confused and substitute the
Nimbus fonts with something else. In any case, the solution to this is to embed the Nimbus fonts in the PDF file.


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Michael wrote:

If your customers do not have Nimbus fonts available on their OS/PDF viewer, the viewer application will proceed using font substitution. It will use whichever font family it thinks is the closest match, I would assume Helvetica. Their application appears to get confused and substitute the Nimbus fonts with something else. In any case, the solution to this is to embed the Nimbus fonts in the PDF file.

How would I do that? It seems to be impossible for "Courier" because this
is a built-in font "and all viewers can display them", as stated at https://durak.org/sean/pubs/software/php-7.0.0/haru.builtin.fonts.html
So it won't make much sense to embed Courier into the PDF anyway?!

It's just that >=ghostscript-gpl-9.56 won't write the requested font name
$myFont=$myPdf->getFont('Courier', 'WinAnsiEncoding');
into the PDF, but the substituted font name "Nimbus" (which seems to
confuse some PDF readers). Why did they change it from 9.55 to 9.56?
This is strange...

To be completely independent from any PDF display software, I could imagine that the following could help:

- install media-fonts/corefonts
- load the ttf font with embed=true:
https://durak.org/sean/pubs/software/php-7.0.0/harudoc.loadttf.html
for example,
$myFontName=$myPdf->loadTTF('/usr/share/fonts/corefonts/cour.ttf', TRUE);
$myFont=$myPdf->getFont($myFontName, 'WinAnsiEncoding');

but I guess it will blow up my nice little PDF files (29 K only!) to a
multiple size... :-(

Anyway, I'll give it a try.

-Matt

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