Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 113195
PDF builtin fonts not working anymore on Mac
Last modified: 2010-07-16 15:08:11 UTC
The fix for issue 109651 was to disable builtin fonts wholesale. That is not a good solution, please enable them again.
The 14fonts known as PDF base fonts are on OSX also available as system fonts which are heavily extended vs. their iso8859-1-only builtin counterparts. If there was a way to know early that the builtins supported everything that is requested from them (i.e. only iso8859-1) reenabling them would be trivial. This info is not available from the apps though. Also having a mixture of builtin- and their system- counterpart fonts in the same line for alternating glyphs has many more disadvantages. Issue 109651 was just one obvious example.
Then I guess reenabling them is indeed trivial, since their exact are described in their font descriptor: "WinAnsiEncoding".
The important question is whether the app+doc has some texts where a builtin-font candidate is selected and the base14-coverage does not suffice. We already know that the builtin fonts do not cover anything beyond their ansi-only codepoints. And even when they are covered there are interesting scenarios what to do with combinations such a 'A' with U+0306 (breve). Should the 'A' come from the builtin-font and the Breve from its system-font counterpart? The system-font suggests a ligature and updates the positioning, as it knows the detailsfrom its "morx" table. When there are such gray areas of course the best solution is to always trust the system font, which is what we do now.
As an additional data point: the Quart-builtin-PDF-export embeds the required subset from the system- fonts and does not try to use a base14 even if it was possible. Now we behave so to and integrate better with the system.
The Quartz built-in print to PDF omits a lot of features that we have, e.g. hyperlinks and form controls. Specifically the "Quartz PDF export" does not have a checkbox giving the user the opportunity to disable use of the 14 base fonts. We on the other hand have such - which is now useless. Those who have a problem with the built-in fonts can disable them - only not anymore on Mac. Worse those that explicitly do not want to blow up their tiny 26k PDF document by 500k of font subsets now don't have that option anymore. That simply sucks, so please enable built-in fonts again.
fixed in CWS vcl113 again, kicked out issue 109651
closing