OpenType fonts not displayed as bold in PDF

rbuser

Hi,

When exporting reports with Open Type fonts as PDF files using
TppPDFDevice or simply selecting PDF in the "Print to file" dialog, I
noticed that bold fonts aren't displayed as such in the PDF viewer -
they are displayed as non-bold, i.e. the normal way. I embedded all the
fonts to the PDF using "PDFSettings.EmbedFontOptions := [efAllFonts]"

Besides that, bold OpenType fonts are correctly displayed in the Report
Bulder's print preview, and they are also correctly displayed in the PDF
if I print the report using PDFCreator.

To reproduce the issue I used the font available here:
http://www.fontspace.com/gluk/rawengulksans (file RawengulkSans-094.otf
in the zip archive). I also tested on a demo copy of RB 14.05 and the
results were the same.

What can I do to fix this issue?

Thanks in advance and regards,
Jure

nicocizik

This will be addressed for the next release of ReportBuilder.

The font you are using does not natively support bold or italic
characters. When you set Bold or Italic, Windows uses internal logic to
render the character glyphs as such. PDF with embedded fonts can only
use the characters available so for your font, bold or italic letters do
not display correctly.

For complex Unicode characters we work around this by manually skewing
letters or re-drawiing them over and over in slightly different
positions to mimic italic or bold letters. This obviously does not give
as high quality output as Windows but it is the recommended way to
perform this task.

Even with this logic in place, it is highly recommended that you use
fonts that internally support bold and italic character glyphs if you
wish to embed the font into your PDF document. For instance, if you
navigate to the Windows\Fonts directory on your machine and double click
Arial, you will see that it contains numerous fonts within (Arial, Arial
Bold, Arial Italic, Arial Bold Italic, etc.).

rbuser

Hi Nico,

thanks for the thorough answer. If it's possible, I'd only ask one more

nicocizik

Hi Jure,


Yes probably. It appears they are also using some sort of font
substitution with the built-in Type1 fonts. I'm unsure what trick they
are using but if you can talk them into letting me look at their source,
I'd be happy to look into it .

I added logic to manually render bold and italic styles for all fonts
(including the one you gave a link to) using the methods described in my
previous post for the next version of ReportBuilder.

rbuser

Nico, thank you again for the explanation.

Regards,
Jure