More fonts

Hello.

We're building an app. The app generates PDFs from HTML templates. We think pdfcrowd is pretty awesome because it looks exactly like what we need. Except for one thing.

Our template uses Helvetica and Georgia, both pretty common font choices on the web. Yet for some reason, the PDFs created by pdfcrowd look garbled. Are the two fonts installed? If no, could you add them? If yes, why doesn't it look pretty?

Cheers and keep up the good work,
Tim

These two fonts are installed. Please, check that they are actually used in your PDFs - e.g. in Adobe Reader you can verify that via the File|Properties|Fonts menu item.

Please, attach your HTML code and the created PDF - we will look into it. What PDF viewer do you use?

Thanks for the fast reply!

The PDF that we generate via print as PDF shows Helvetica and Georgia correctly in Adobe Acrobat 9. The PDF from pdfcrowd contains DejaVuSans instead of Helvetica.

As viewers we use Acrobat 9 and the Mac OSX Viewer.

The source HTML/CSS:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/446982/reportExcerpt/indexEN.html

The PDF generated by pdfcrowd:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/446982/reportExcerpt/pdfcrowd_output.pdf

The PDF generated in OSX (Firefox -> Print as PDF):
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/446982/reportExcerpt/osx_output.pdf

Thanks a lot in advance.

Thanks. In the previous post you reported that the PDFs are garbled. However, the PDF you posted looks fine (besides embedding DejaVuSans instead of Helvetica).

One of our users reported that letters in our PDFs are sometimes garbled in odd ways in Preview on his Mac OSX. Can you confirm that for this PDF? If yes, please could you post a screen shot?

Well, 'garbled' is clearly a subjective thing :)

Technically, the PDFs are generated just fine, but because the fonts are different they layout is shifted around.

Preview displays the PDF by pdfcrowd pretty good, in fact I think it looks a lot better than what Acrobat spits out.

Is it possible to get Helvetica instead of (or rather, in addition to) DejaVuSans?

Firstly, sorry for misinformation - we checked our systems more thoroughly and found out that we do not have Helvetica installed. Unfortunately, Helvetica is a commercial font provided by Linotype and we do not want to deal with licensing issues at this time.

So instead, we changed our font configuration so that the Helvetica font family is mapped to Arial now. Actually, Arial and Helvetica are almost indistinguishable fonts and the PDF generated from your HTML looks fine now (at least to us :).

Let us know if it is an acceptable solution for you.

Thanks a lot for the support! It looks great with Arial. We'll keep our eyes open for free alternatives to Helvetica, maybe there's more that could be added to the font pool. We totally agree that licensing issues are something to avoid if possible.

Super awesome!

Cheers,
Tim