How to embed fonts with FPDF and mPDF
I'm trying to embed Helvetica Neue into my PDF, but all of the resources I find online are overly complicated and filled with what I think is unneeded information.
Can anyone point me to a step by step tutorial of how to include fonts in FPDF?
Thanks in advance.
Answer
It's not too hard.
Suppose we want to add the Rockford font.
First, we need to use ttf2pt1 (or some equivalent program) to generate the AFM file for Rockford. Run the following command in a shell.
ttf2pt1 Rockford
The command will create Rockford.afm in the current shell directory.
Change your shell to the the makefont directory in the fpdf installation directory
cd /<...>/fpdf/font/makefont
Execute an interactive php shell
php -a
Run the following commands in the interactive PHP shell.
php > require("makefont.php");
php > MakeFont("/<font location>/Rockford.ttf", "/<font location>/Rockford.afm");
php > exit
You should see two new files, Rockford.php and Rockford.z in the current directory. Copy these two files to the 'fonts' directory in the fpdf installation directory.
cp Rockford.z Rockford.php /<...>/fpdf/font/
At this point, the installation of the new font into FPDF is done.
To use your font when generating a PDF, you must first import the font as follows.
$fpdf->AddFont('Rockford', '', 'Rockford.php');
You can then use the font when needed in your script. For example, to set the font to Rockford size 8, you would write the following statement.
$fpdf->SetFont('Rockford', '', 8);