Using Outline fonts

The afp2pdf transform supports Outline Font Object Content Architecture (FOCA). The addition of FOCA support improves character placement for AFP raster fonts and provides 100% font fidelity for AFP outline fonts.

Outline fonts can be embedded as internal resources, or they can be referenced as external resources and mapped. In either case, the font may be defined through the coded font name or with a character set/code page pair.

The afp2pdf transform parses and extracts the outline font character set information it needs when outputting the text and saves the information in these files:

PFM file
Contains general information about the outline font obtained from the character set. This file can be external, saved on the hard drive, or kept in memory.
PFB file
Contains the data about the outline font. It must be extracted and kept on the hard drive or in memory.

For both cases (embedded or external Outline font) the PFM and PFB files are embedded within the PDF document, and the text is written in the PDF file using the embedded PFM and PFB information.

The afp2pdf transformer creates a temporary .cnv file to be used by ICU for the conversion of text from Unicode to the specified codepage and for the conversion of text from the code page to Unicode.

In this section:

  1. Using non-Latin code pages with Outline fonts
    The afp2pdf transform supports non-Latin codepages for AFP Outline fonts.
  2. Mapping outline fonts
    If the AFP document you are converting to PDF contains Outline fonts, you can create a smaller PDF document by adding the Outline fonts to the afp2pdf.cfg file.
Parent topic: Transform AFP data to PDF