font embedding and Windows font fallback

Goulu · February 2018

My report should be able to display (almost) any Unicode character, but our customers' PCs are not supposed to have an Unicode font installed (such as Arial Unicode MS) and we would prefer not to install additional (large and costly) fonts on them.

So I was relying on the Windows font fallback strategy by setting all TfrxMemoView to Arial font and set

with frxPDFExport1 do begin
EmbeddedFonts:= true;
Compressed:=true;

, expecting that the pdf will use and embed characters from fallback fonts such as SimSun or Segoe UI automagically when needed.

However, Unicode characters missing in Arial show up as "tofu" blocks in the pdf, and using Adobe Acrobat, I could see they are forced to Arial.

Is there a way for Fast Reports to use the font fallback mechanism AND embed those characters ?

thanks !

gpi · March 2018

For unicode characters you should use unicode fonts (like Arial Unicode MS)

Goulu · March 2018

gpi wrote: »

For unicode characters you should use unicode fonts (like Arial Unicode MS)

yes I know, but there is no single font with all the characters I need, and the .pdf would be too large, so I tried another approach : dynamically changing the font depending on the language.
I set a style for all memos that are translated and tried to change the style's font if the result will be in japanese:

procedure DoReport(LReportData:TReportData);
var
  LStyle : TfrxStyleItem;
  i:integer;
begin
  with FFastReport do begin
    frxPDFExport.FileName:= LReportData.FDestFile;
    ReportTranslate.Language:= LReportData.FLanguage;
    with frxreport do begin
      LoadFromFile(LReportData.FSrcReport, True); 

      if LReportData.FLanguage='jp' then begin
        for i:=0 to Styles.Count-1 do begin
          LStyle := Styles[i];
          LStyle.Font.Name:='SimSun';
        end;
        // something needed to update styles ?
      end;

      if not PrepareReport(True) then raise Exception.Create('report generation failed');
      if not Export(frxPDFExport) then raise Exception.Create('pdf export failed');
    end;
  end;
end;

however, the .pdf still uses Arial (the font of the style for other languages)

What should I do to re-apply the style after changing the font ?

font embedding and Windows font fallback

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