Re: PDFs for user-guide, accessibility-guide and system-admin-guide

[Ryan Paul <gaerdin gmail com>]

On Sun, 2006-03-12 at 15:33 -0700, Brent Smith wrote:
> Jeff Waugh wrote:
> > <quote who="Brent Smith">
> > 
> >>What is the licensing policy for the said font and where can I find it?
> >>This is something I've been meaning to do, but haven't got around to yet.
> >>Right now it uses the default fonts for PDF, which makes the PDF size
> >>considerably smaller.
> > 
> > 
> > Should be shipped in any modern distribution.
> > 
> >   http://www.gnome.org/fonts/
> > 
> > - Jeff
> > 
> 
> Here is my attempt at this:
> 
> http://www.gnome.org/~bmsmith/system-admin-guide-bitstream.pdf
> 
> There are a number of problems I see:
> 1) There is no italic serif font shipped by bitstream.
> 2) Due to a limitation of FOP, only glyphs used in the truetype font are
> embedded in the PDF (no codepage information).  Therefore searching,
> indexing and cut-n-paste do not work properly[1].
> 
> I got around 2) by specifying the ansi encoding when generating the font
> metrics which seems to work ok, but 1) is still a blocker.
> 
> Do you know why there is no italic serif font?
> 
> [1]http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/0.20.5/fonts.html#embedding

You might want to consider using the DejaVu font collection, it's a
Bitstream Vera derivative that includes a broader range of characters. I
initially decided to use it in my own printed stuff instead of Bitstream
Vera because it comes with an italic serif font and Bitstream doesnt.

http://dejavu.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

It's broader character support makes it capable of handling some foreign
languages better than Bitstream Vera, which is another good reason to
use it for documentation:

http://oskuro.net/blog/2006/03/02/

It's also distributed under an open license, but I'm not sure how widely
distributed it is at this point.

-- 
Ryan Paul <gaerdin gmail com>