[gentoo-user] PHP, Haru, Ghostscript, Courier, and Nimbus

[Matthias Hanft]

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

[Michael]

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.

[Matthias Hanft]

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

[Grant Edwards]

On 2022-11-07, Matthias Hanft <m...@hanft.de> wrote:
> 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?!

Nobody said anything about embedding Courier. You said the problem
happened when the "Nimbus" font was used, so it was suggested you
embed the "Nimbus" font.

[Matthias Hanft]

Grant Edwards wrote:
>
> Nobody said anything about embedding Courier. You said the problem
> happened when the "Nimbus" font was used, so it was suggested you
> embed the "Nimbus" font.

But I don't want to use / embed the Nimbus font at all!

libharu is called by HaruDoc::getFont('Courier', 'WinAnsiEncoding')

This *does* work - the font *is* Courier when you look at the PDF.

But -
- until ghostscript 9.55, in the PDF font properties, the font
was correctly named "Courier" so that every PDF reader could
display it;
- from ghostscript 9.56, in the PDF font properties, the font
is named "Nimbus" instead of "Courier", and some PDF readers
have problems to display.

The only "Nimbus reference" I have found is a line in the file
/usr/share/ghostscript/9.56.1/Resource/Init/Fontmap.GS which reads

/Courier /NimbusMonoPS-Regular ;

but this line is the same in gs 9.55 and 9.56. So I don't understand
what/why has changed here.

BTW, I now have tried to embed truetype fonts. Seems to work
(although the character outline is thinner, overall more "pale").
File size increases from 29K to 121K - would be OK for me...

-Matt