[JW Lua] No truetype font support in FCPDFWriter functionality ?

[Jari Williamsson]

On 2015-06-08 10:52, Jan Angermüller wrote:

> I played a bit with the new JW Lua PDF functionality.
> Is it correct that it currently only supports Times, Helvetica and
> Courier as fonts, but no truetype fonts in general ?
> I.e. it's not possible to export any musical symbols or to select other
> text fonts for the generated PDF ?
> That's probably what you mean with "stock" font in the documentation
> (i.e. what libharu calls Base14 fonts:
> http://libharu.sourceforge.net/fonts.html ).
> Maybe you could add this restricted font list to the documentation ?
> And maybe also link to the list of possible PDF error codes (
> http://libharu.sourceforge.net/error_handling.html ) ?
>
> A support for ttf fonts would be a great addition to a future release.

Currently, the PDF support is experimental, and it currently only 
support the Acrobat stock fonts. Probably most importantly, the support 
isn't Unicode compliant yet and LibHaru seems to only support UTF-8 at 
best, in a development branch (and no UTF-16 support AFAIK).

I have not yet decided the exact route for the PDF support in JW Lua. 
One option is to make it text and line graphics only, but that feels 
limited in the music notation field, specially since music notation 
quickly moves towards SMuFL.

Using custom fonts is solvable in the future, but requires lots of work 
on my part (since it's not natively supported by LibHaru). We'll see. I 
need to dedicate some time to get the PDF support right.


Best regards,

Jari Williamsson