Overview The ReportMill design application allows you to select from all available system fonts (or at least those available to the Java Runtime). The most important aspect of ReportMill and fonts is that you generally want to ensure that the exact same fonts chosen for your templates (on your design machine) are available on your deployment server. This can sometimes be problematic, because different platforms ship with different sets of base fonts. Fonts available to the Java Runtime ReportMill uses the Java.awt.Font object for font information. You can check what fonts are available in your deployment runtime with the following code: prompt> java -cp ReportMill10.jar com.reportmill.Shell -fonts This corresponds to the following Java code GraphicsEnvironment.getAllFonts(). If any font used in your template does not show up in this list on your server, ReportMill will perform font substitution and your reports will likely look somewhat different on the server. Font Substitution Warning If a font referenced in your template is not available at runtime on the server, ReportMill will print a warning to System.err in the following format: RMFont: Couldn't find font for Arial (using Garamond) If your reports look like they are using the wrong font, look for this message in the console to see if your system is missing a particular font. PDF Base fonts (Arial, Courier, Times, Helvetica) When generating PDF, there is a base set of fonts that are particularly efficient and consistent. Adobe's PDF spec guarantees that the fonts listed above are available to all PDF viewers, so ReportMill can reference these fonts without having to embed the outlines of the fonts in the PDF, which results in smaller PDF files. However, if used, these fonts do still need to be present on the server. Windows Windows users shouldn't have any problem since a large number of TrueType fonts ship with Windows in the C:/Windows/Fonts directory and Java seems to use any font located in that directory. Mac OS X The Mac can be a little trickier for a couple reasons. First, it seems that the Java Runtime finds all system fonts when someone is logged into the console (in /Library/Fonts, ~/Library/Fonts and /System/Library/Fonts). However, if a server application is later launched when the user console isn't active, Java tends to only find fonts in $JAVA_HOME/lib/fonts (where JAVA_HOME is /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Home). So the most reliable approach to using Mac OS X as a server deployment machine is to copy fonts used in the template there. However, the second problem is that many fonts on the Mac are not packaged as straight TrueType (.ttf) files, but are instead packaged as Font Suitcases, whereby several individual font files from the same family are archived into one file, either in the resource fork of a Mac OS file (these usually have no extension) or the data fork (these files usually end in .dfont). Java cannot read these files directly (again, when there is no user logged into the console). The answer may be to get the .ttf files from another source or to use a utility to extract them from the non-standard Mac OS X packaging. In the past we've been able to extract ".ttf" files from ".dfont" files with the Fondu utility (http://sourceforge.net/projects/fondu). Solaris, Linux, others If you are deploying on Solaris, Linux or any other server environment, you may be surprised at how few fonts are provided with the standard distribution. Copy any fonts that you have used in your templates to the jre/lib/fonts directory in your JRE distribution (this should be something like /usr/local/java/jre/lib/fonts). Also, please refer to platform specific documentation on fonts for both the platform and the JRE for that platform. Linux Recently we've heard that certain Linux distributions may have additional steps to make additional fonts available to the JRE. Check the documentation for your Linux release, but here are some notes from one of our developers: 1) Copy the fonts to a font directory in /usr/share/fonts Legacy (Java 1.3) For Java 1.3, ReportMill will fall back on it's native TrueType font parsing technology. Under these conditions, it will be necessary to copy the fonts to a standard location in the file system so ReportMill can find them:
If ReportMill fails to find the font file, it will print a warning to the console. This warning also contains a full list of the locations that ReportMill looked for font files. Use this to verify the location of the deployment account's home directory ('~'). Additionally, the native ReportMill TrueType font parsing is not as complete as the AWT font parsing and may fail to load some incorrectly coded TrueType fonts (font designers often take liberties with the spec, which makes it hard to offer complete support of all fonts). |