Re: [gentoo-user] PHP, Haru, Ghostscript, Courier, and Nimbus

[Michael]

On Monday, 7 November 2022 11:56:34 GMT Matthias Hanft wrote:
> Hi,
>
> since many years, I'm using PHP (currently 7.4) and the (self-
> compiled) Haru extension to produce PDF invoices on my server.
>
> Internally, Haru seems to use Ghostscript, because:
>
> - up to app-text/ghostscript-gpl-9.55.0-r2, when you look at the
>   PDF "properties" and then the "fonts" tab, there is "Courier",
>   "Helvetica" and "Helvetica-BoldOblique" - just as requested in
>   my PHP script like
>            $myPdf=new HaruDoc();
>            [...some page settings...]
>            $myFont=$myPdf->getFont('Courier', 'WinAnsiEncoding');
>
> - from app-text/ghostscript-gpl-9.56.1-r3 on, everything looks like
>   before, but in the "properties/fonts" tab of the resulting PDF,
>   the fonts are now "NimbusMonoPS-Regular", "NimbusSands-BoldItalic"
>   and "NimbusSans-Regular".
>
> I have already found this "translation" in the file
> /usr/share/ghostscript/9.56.1/Resource/Init/Fontmap.GS but there is
> obviously no relevant difference in that file between 9.55 and 9.56.
>
> Some of my customers now seem to have trouble if the fonts in the
> PDF properties are named "Nimbus" instead of "Courier" - they just
> see some hieroglyphics when displaying the PDF.
>
> Any idea that's going wrong here?
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> -Matt

If your customers do not have Nimbus fonts available on their OS/PDF viewer, 
the viewer application will proceed using font substitution.  It will use 
whichever font family it thinks is the closest match, I would assume 
Helvetica.  Their application appears to get confused and substitute the 
Nimbus fonts with something else.  In any case, the solution to this is to 
embed the Nimbus fonts in the PDF file.