[xep-support] Re: Fonts and all

Very clear, thanks Kevin.

regards Dave P

On 3 March 2015 at 22:52, Kevin Brown <kevin@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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-- 
Dave Pawson
XSLT XSL-FO FAQ.
Docbook FAQ.
http://www.dpawson.co.uk
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