Adobe PDF Base-14 Fonts

XSL-FO Tutorials - Herong's Tutorial Examples

∟Adobe PDF Base-14 Fonts

This section describes Adobe PDF Base-14 fonts in 5 font families: Helvetica, Times, Courier, Symbol, and ZapfDingbats.

In the last tutorial, we learned that XSL-FO defines 5 generic font families: "serif", "sans-serif", "cursive", "fantasy", and "monospace". All XSL processors should support all of them. If your XSL-FO documents uses only these font families, you should not have any issues formatting them to any output devices.

But if you want to use a specific font family, you need to read your XSL processor document to see that font families are supported for each output device type. For example, both Apache FOP and RenderX XEP support Adobe Base-14 Fonts on PDF output files:

4 font sets in the Helvetica family: normal, bold, and bold italic, with any size. XSL-FO "sans-serif" font family is normally mapped to "Helvetica".
4 font sets in the Times family: normal, bold, and bold italic, with any size XSL-FO "serif" font family is normally mapped to "Times".
4 font sets in the Courier family: normal, bold, and bold italic, with any size. XSL-FO "monospace" font family is normally mapped to "Courier".
1 font sets in the Symbol family: normal, with any size. "Symbol" is normally used for Greek alphabets and some symbols like: Ω, φ, ≠, ©.
1 font sets in the ZapfDingbats family: normal, with any size. "ZapfDingbats" is normally used for Zapf dingbats like: ✌, ✍, ❀, ☺.

Here is my tutorial example, Adobe-PDF-Base-14-Fonts.fo, that uses Adobe PDF Base-14 fonts to format some characters, symbols and dingbats:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!-- Adobe-PDF-Base-14-Fonts.fo
 - Copyright (c) 2006 HerongYang.com. All Rights Reserved.
-->
<fo:root xmlns:fo="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Format">
 <fo:layout-master-set>
  <fo:simple-page-master master-name="page" 
   margin="0.1in" page-height="4.4in" page-width="3.4in">
   <fo:region-body region-name="body"/>
  </fo:simple-page-master>
 </fo:layout-master-set>
 <fo:page-sequence master-reference="page">
  <fo:flow flow-name="body">
<fo:block margin-top="6pt">Generic font "Helvetica":
 <fo:inline background-color="#ffddff"
  font-family="Helvetica" font-size="12pt" font-weight="bold">
  The tangram is a dissection puzzle.
 </fo:inline>
</fo:block>
<fo:block margin-top="6pt">Generic font "Times":
 <fo:inline background-color="#ffddff"
  font-family="Times" font-size="12pt" font-style="italic">
  The tangram is a dissection puzzle.
 </fo:inline>
</fo:block>
<fo:block margin-top="6pt">Generic font "Courier":
 <fo:inline background-color="#ffddff"
  font-family="Courier" font-size="12pt">
  The tangram is a dissection puzzle.
 </fo:inline>
</fo:block>
<fo:block margin-top="6pt">Generic font "Symbol":
 <fo:inline background-color="#ffddff"
  font-family="Symbol" font-size="12pt">
! ∀ # ∃
Α Β Χ Δ Ε Φ Γ Η Ι ϑ Κ Λ Μ Ν Ο
Π Θ Ρ Σ Τ Υ ς Ω Ξ Ψ Ζ ∴ ⊥
α β χ δ ε φ γ η ι ϕ κ λ μ ν ο
π θ ρ σ τ υ ϖ ω ξ ψ ζ
 </fo:inline>
</fo:block>
<fo:block margin-top="6pt">Generic font "ZapfDingbats":
 <fo:inline background-color="#ffddff"
  font-family="ZapfDingbats" font-size="12pt">
✁ ✂ ✃ ✄ ☎ ✆ ✇ ✈ ✉ ☛ ☞ ✌ ✍ ✎ ✏
✐ ✑ ✒ ✓ ✔ ✕ ✖ ✗ ✘ ✙ ✚ ✛ ✜ ✝ ✞ ✟
✠ ✡ ✢ ✣ ✤ ✥ ✦ ✧ ★ ✩ ✪ ✫ ✬ ✭ ✮ ✯
✰ ✱ ✲ ✳ ✴ ✵ ✶ ✷ ✸ ✹ ✺ ✻ ✼ ✽ ✾ ✿
❀ ❁ ❂ ❃ ❄ ❅ ❆ ❇ ❈ ❉ ❊ ❋ ● ❍ ■ ❏
☺ ☻ ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ • ◘ ○ ❐ ❑ ❒ ▲ ▼ ◆ ❖
 </fo:inline>
</fo:block>
  </fo:flow>
 </fo:page-sequence>
</fo:root>

If you process this example XSL-FO document with Apache FOP tool to generate a PDF file, you will get some warnings:

herong> fop -fo XSL-FO-Generic-Font-Families.fo -awt

herong> fop -fo Adobe-PDF-Base-14-Fonts.fo \
   -pdf Adobe-PDF-Base-14-Fonts_fop.pdf

... org.apache.fop.events.LoggingEventListener processEvent
WARNING: Glyph "?" (0x263a, smileface) not available 
in font "ZapfDingbats".

... org.apache.fop.events.LoggingEventListener processEvent
WARNING: Glyph "?" (0x263b, blacksmilingface) not available 
in font "ZapfDingbats".

WARNING: Glyph "ò" (0x2022, bullet) not available 
in font "ZapfDingbats".

WARNING: Glyph "?" (0x25d8, bulletinverse) not available 
in font "ZapfDingbats".

WARNING: Glyph "?" (0x25cb, circle) not available 
in font "ZapfDingbats".

... org.apache.fop.events.LoggingEventListener processEvent
INFO: Rendered page #1.