[xep-support] Re: Fonts and all
Mark Giffin
mgiffin at earthlink.net
Wed Mar 4 10:59:00 PST 2015
I agree, very useful, I saved this email for future reference.
Mark
On 3/3/2015 11:29 PM, Dave Pawson wrote:
> Very clear, thanks Kevin.
>
> regards Dave P
>
> On 3 March 2015 at 22:52, Kevin Brown <kevin at renderx.com> wrote:
>> A few recent questions have been asked in Stackoverflow and also in our own
>> support groups about fonts. I thought a nice sample here would be
>> appropriate.
>>
>> 1) First, get access to a Unicode font that contains the characters you
>> want.
>>
>> Well there are many places and we are not a font repository. However, one
>> great place to look is Google and specifically Google’s fonts. They are
>> trying to organize a complete set of fonts for most all of the world’s
>> languages. There are certainly many more places and the group is welcome to
>> chime in. I happen to have a nice setup with many of the “noto” fonts on
>> Google. See https://www.google.com/get/noto/#/
>>
>> 2) Next, add those fonts to you configuration.
>>
>> Again, there are many fonts types and many places to put them. Here I am
>> only going to describe how I do it to stay organized. I prefer to organize
>> all my fonts under the RenderX installation. Upgrades will preserve them and
>> it makes it easier to deploy to other machines. You can have your own
>> methods for sure, organize them into your own areas.
>> The "xep.xml" file contains all the information about fonts. There are many,
>> many different settings and you can find them all in our documentation. I
>> will just cover adding a complete family of the Noto fonts here for
>> Simplified Chinese.
>>
>> First I downloaded the ZIP archive of Simplified Chinese Noto fonts from
>> here: https://www.google.com/get/noto/#/family/noto-sans-hans
>> In the RenderX installation directory, there is already a directory called
>> "fonts/".
>> That directory contains the base14 fonts that all installations should come
>> with that deal with PDF (the 4 variations each of Helvetica, Times and
>> Courier plus Symbol and ZapfDingbats).
>> I created a subdirectory under this directory called "Noto/" to handle all
>> my google Noto fonts.
>> I unzipped the Simplified Chinese fonts in this directory.
>> It contains 7 fonts, all starting with "NotoSansCJKsc" with various weights
>> (Light through Black).
>> So we need to add these all (if we need them all) to "xep.xml".
>> Here's a snippet from my "xep.xml" showing how they are added:
>>
>> <fonts xmlns="http://www.renderx.com/XEP/config" xml:base="fonts/"
>> default-family="Helvetica">
>> ...
>>
>> <!-- Google Noto Fonts -->
>> <font-group xml:base="Noto/" label="Noto" embed="true" subset="true"
>> initial-encoding="standard">
>> <font-family name="NotoSansCJKsc">
>> <font weight="100"><font-data otf="NotoSansCJKsc-Thin.otf"/></font>
>> <font weight="200"><font-data otf="NotoSansCJKsc-Light.otf"/></font>
>> <font weight="300"><font-data
>> otf="NotoSansCJKsc-DemiLight.otf"/></font>
>> <font><font-data otf="NotoSansCJKsc-Regular.otf"/></font>
>> <font weight="500"><font-data
>> otf="NotoSansCJKsc-Medium.otf"/></font>
>> <font weight="bold"><font-data otf="NotoSansCJKsc-Bold.otf"/></font>
>> <font weight="800"><font-data otf="NotoSansCJKsc-Black.otf"/></font>
>> </font-family>
>> </font-group>
>> </fonts>
>>
>> Now, a few points of interest here.
>> The <fonts> section contains the overall set of <fonts> available to
>> RenderX. It has an attribute "xml:base" that instructs RenderX to look
>> inside the "fonts/" directory for all fonts *where explicit paths are not
>> specified*.
>> I created a "Noto/" directory under that directory so I add an "xml:base" to
>> my <font-group> that points to this directory.
>> Now, all the files in that directory can be accessed by relative paths.
>> In other words ... I have a file under the RenderX installation as
>> "fonts/Noto/NotoSansCJKsc-Thin.otf".
>>
>> Also note the font-weight's.
>> Noto fonts (for ideographic languages) could be provided in several weights
>> like Thin, Light, DemiLight, etc.
>> So, in XSL FO/RenderX terms we have:
>>
>> Thin = 100
>> Light = 200
>> DemiLight = 300
>> Normal or Regular = 400 (or no weight specified)
>> Medium = 500
>> Bold = 700 (or "bold" specified for font-weight in XSL FO)
>> Black = 800
>>
>> So the above "xep.xml" fragment maps all of the various possible weights
>> that Google fonts provides. Of course, you do not have to use (or allow
>> people to use) all of these. They are designed correctly as individual font
>> files. So each has to be handled separately and included separately. More on
>> this at the end.
>>
>> 3) Format documents referencing the fonts you specify.
>>
>> You specify the font-family (at least) and in this case also the font-weight
>> to cause the font selected. You would use the <font-family> @name in
>> "xep.xml" to reference it.
>> So for example, here's a bit of FO that would cause all of the above fonts
>> to be used:
>>
>> <fo:block-container font-family="NotoSansCJKsc">
>> <fo:block>Chinese Sample using
>> NotoSansCJKsc</fo:block>
>> <fo:block space-before="6pt"
>> font-weight="100">大橋全長二千六百八十三點五八五米，其中主橋長六百三十六點六
>> 米。主橋為雙塔雙預應力混凝土邊主梁斜拉橋。主塔呈鑽石型，高一百0六點九米，塔
>> 的上方套紅鐫刻江澤民題寫的橋名。雙主塔通過一百七十六根斜拉索承載橋面。主橋橋
>> 面寬二十九點八米；橋下水位通航淨高為二十四米，可通行三千吨級的輪船。
>> </fo:block>
>> <fo:block space-before="6pt"
>> font-weight="200">大橋全長二千六百八十三點五八五米，其中主橋長六百三十六點六
>> 米。主橋為雙塔雙預應力混凝土邊主梁斜拉橋。主塔呈鑽石型，高一百0六點九米，塔
>> 的上方套紅鐫刻江澤民題寫的橋名。雙主塔通過一百七十六根斜拉索承載橋面。主橋橋
>> 面寬二十九點八米；橋下水位通航淨高為二十四米，可通行三千吨級的輪船。
>> </fo:block>
>> <fo:block space-before="6pt"
>> font-weight="300">大橋全長二千六百八十三點五八五米，其中主橋長六百三十六點六
>> 米。主橋為雙塔雙預應力混凝土邊主梁斜拉橋。主塔呈鑽石型，高一百0六點九米，塔
>> 的上方套紅鐫刻江澤民題寫的橋名。雙主塔通過一百七十六根斜拉索承載橋面。主橋橋
>> 面寬二十九點八米；橋下水位通航淨高為二十四米，可通行三千吨級的輪船。
>> </fo:block>
>> <fo:block space-before="6pt">大橋全長二千六
>> 百八十三點五八五米，其中主橋長六百三十六點六米。主橋為雙塔雙預應力混凝土邊主
>> 梁斜拉橋。主塔呈鑽石型，高一百0六點九米，塔的上方套紅鐫刻江澤民題寫的橋名。
>> 雙主塔通過一百七十六根斜拉索承載橋面。主橋橋面寬二十九點八米；橋下水位通航淨
>> 高為二十四米，可通行三千吨級的輪船。</fo:block>
>> <fo:block space-before="6pt"
>> font-weight="500">大橋全長二千六百八十三點五八五米，其中主橋長六百三十六點六
>> 米。主橋為雙塔雙預應力混凝土邊主梁斜拉橋。主塔呈鑽石型，高一百0六點九米，塔
>> 的上方套紅鐫刻江澤民題寫的橋名。雙主塔通過一百七十六根斜拉索承載橋面。主橋橋
>> 面寬二十九點八米；橋下水位通航淨高為二十四米，可通行三千吨級的輪船。
>> </fo:block>
>> <fo:block space-before="6pt"
>> font-weight="bold">大橋全長二千六百八十三點五八五米，其中主橋長六百三十六點
>> 六米。主橋為雙塔雙預應力混凝土邊主梁斜拉橋。主塔呈鑽石型，高一百0六點九米，
>> 塔的上方套紅鐫刻江澤民題寫的橋名。雙主塔通過一百七十六根斜拉索承載橋面。主橋
>> 橋面寬二十九點八米；橋下水位通航淨高為二十四米，可通行三千吨級的輪船。
>> </fo:block>
>> <fo:block space-before="6pt"
>> font-weight="800">大橋全長二千六百八十三點五八五米，其中主橋長六百三十六點六
>> 米。主橋為雙塔雙預應力混凝土邊主梁斜拉橋。主塔呈鑽石型，高一百0六點九米，塔
>> 的上方套紅鐫刻江澤民題寫的橋名。雙主塔通過一百七十六根斜拉索承載橋面。主橋橋
>> 面寬二十九點八米；橋下水位通航淨高為二十四米，可通行三千吨級的輪船。
>> </fo:block>
>> </fo:block-container>
>>
>>
>> That's all there is to it. Get a font, store it somewhere and add it to the
>> configuration. Then add text and make sure you tell XEP (through XSL FO) to
>> use that particular font.
>>
>> Now, some specific hints on fonts.
>>
>> I love (and hate) the Noto fonts above. Why both?
>> Love: Well, they provide great coverage of all the characters. If you are
>> producing technical documentation then great, this is a great use of these
>> fonts.
>> Hate: They are HUGE (15MB file) and very large even when subsetted and
>> embedded. I would not necessarily use them to print 100,000 invoices, I
>> would use them to do a technical manual.
>>
>> The little text above with fonts embedded and subsetted is a CRAZY 8 MB.
>> Insane! The same exact document with Simsun font (which only would have one
>> weight) is only 32kb.
>> And If I format that simple little document above which access the 7 fonts
>> listed (15mb each) for the simple characters in it, it takes 20 seconds to
>> format.
>>
>> We had another example where a customer wanted to use "Arial Unicode" font.
>> This font file is 37MB and is copyrighted. They were creating letters and
>> were using "Arial Unicode" to select a specific bullet character they liked.
>> The "Arial Unicode" copyright notice that is required to be inserted when
>> embedding the font is about 250kb alone so that a simple letter with one
>> bullet is 300kb/file. The processing time to process each document was about
>> 3 seconds.
>> I selected a similar bullet from "ZapfDingbats". The results were 12kb file
>> size and 12 documents processed per second. Yes, 3 seconds per document went
>> to 12 documents per second. A "slight" improvement.
>>
>> So, try to use a tight, controlled font -- only what you need for a
>> particular application. The smallest font file possible that has all the
>> glyphs you need.
>>
>> Kevin Brown
>> RenderX
>>
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