NAME

FontFactory::Type1 - Provides the standard Adobe PostScript Type 1 fonts in a friendly package for use with many PDF::* modules.

A DocFont object is a Type 1 font of a specific name and point size. It provides all the methods available in module Font::AFM plus some extra convenient methods (and aliases). All its methods provide outputs properly scaled for its font and point size.

WARNING Versions before v1.0.0 had some erroneous methods and should not be used!

SYNOPSIS

Find the fonts available in the current version along with their aliases:

use FontFactory::Type1;
use FontFactory::Type1::Subs;

show-fonts;

# output:
Font family: 'Courier'               (alias: 'c')
Font family: 'Courier-Bold'          (alias: 'ch')
Font family: 'Courier-BoldOblique'   (alias: 'cbo')
Font family: 'Courier-Oblique'       (alias: 'co')
Font family: 'Helvetica'             (alias: 'h')
Font family: 'Helvetica-Bold'        (alias: 'hb')
Font family: 'Helvetica-BoldOblique' (alias: 'hbo')
Font family: 'Helvetica-Oblique'     (alias: 'ho')
Font family: 'MICREncoding'          (alias: 'm')
Font family: 'Symbol'                (alias: 's')
Font family: 'Times-Bold'            (alias: 'tb')
Font family: 'Times-BoldItalic'      (alias: 'tbi')
Font family: 'Times-Italic'          (alias: 'ti')
Font family: 'Times-Roman'           (alias: 't')
Font family: 'Zapfdingbats'          (alias: 'z')

(NOTE: font family MICREncoding is not usable in commercial programs without more investigation. See the notes later in this document.)

Get a copy of the factory for use in your program:

my $ff = FontFactory::Type1.new;

Define a DocFont. Use a name that indicates its face and size for easy use later. For fractional points use a 'd' for the decimal point:

my $t12d1 = $ff.get-font: 't12d1';
say "name: {$t12d1.name}"; # OUTPUT: «name: Times-Roman␤»
say "size: {$t12d1.size}"; # OUTOUT: «size: 12.1␤»

Define another DocFont:

my $c10 = $ff.get-font: 'c10';
say "name: {$c10.name}"; # OUTPUT: «name: Courier␤»
say "size: {$c10.size}"; # OUTOUT: «size: 10␤»

As stated above, in addition to those attributes, all the attributes from Font::AFM are also available plus some added for convenience. For example:

# for typesetting, find the width of a kerned string in PostScript points (72/inch):
my $text = "Some string of text to be typeset in a beautiful PDF document.";
my $wk = $t12d1.stringwidth($text, :kern);
say "kerned width: $wk"; # OUTPUT: «kerned width: 302.3064␤»

DESCRIPTION

FontFactory::Type1 provides easy access to the Adobe standard Type 1 fonts (and their metrics) as used in PDF document creation using modules such as:

PDF::Lite
PDF::Document (WIP)
PDF::Writer (WIP)
Slidemaker (WIP)
CheckWriter (WIP)

A future module, FontFactory, will provide the same benefits for TrueType, OpenType, and Type 1 fonts, but it will require the user to rely on system fonts or provide his or her own font files (the author recommends using Google's free fonts as a starting point for a collection of fonts).

See the accompanying METHODS for details on the methods and their use in your own PDF document.

Notes on the MICR Encoding (MICRE) font

The MICR Encoding font for bank checks was obtained from 1001fonts.com.

The downloaded file was named micr-encoding.zip (which was deleted after unzipping it).

When file micr-encoding.zip was unzipped into the directory, the following files were found:

  '!DigitalGraphicLabs.html'
  '!license.txt'
  micrenc.ttf

The two files in single quotes were renamed to:

DigitalGraphicLabs.html
license.txt

The license basically says the font is free to use for non-commercial purposes.

The font was transformed to an Adobe PostScript Type 1 font by creating .pfa and .afm files using program fontforge. See the complete unzipped package and all the files in directory /dev/fonts and the accompanying file README.fontforge for the procedures used.

AUTHOR

Tom Browder tbrowder@acm.org

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

This library is free software; you may redistribute it or modify it under the Artistic License 2.0.