Microsoft TrueType Corefonts for ContuttoPDF

Microsoft TrueType Corefonts are the popular fonts used on the Microsoft Windows operating system. They have been released a while ago under a (for Microsoft measures) quite permissive license. It is now possible to integrate them into ContuttoPDF documents.

What does that mean? Well, PDFs have two ways of displaying fonts: The first is to use a few fonts that are included with every PDF reader. The second way is to embed the font (or a subset) into the PDF document itself, thus making the PDF layout more beautiful and platform independent. ContuttoPDF is able - with some preparations - to embed any TrueType font into a PDF document.

The EULA of the MS TT Corefonts allows non-commercial and unmodified redistribution of the Corefonts set, and it allows embedding/subsetting. Because of the large popularity of these fonts, I decided to create a package that allows the usage of the MS TrueType Corefonts with ContuttoPDF. But: This package is not OpenSource software, due to the nature of Microsoft’s TrueType Corefonts EULA.

This package also contains a binary program, ttf2pt1, which is a statically compiled version of the ttf2pt1 utility, version 3.4.4. It is linked against (in this case: including) portions of the Freefonts library by the Freefonts project and the zlib library by the zlib project. It is intended to run on any Linux machine (most servers are Linux powerded). This program can be distributed freely under a BSD-style license (see the README for more).

Now enough with the talking…

Let’s rock

• Be sure that you have ContuttoPDF 0.3 or higher
• Download the ContuttoMSfonts package,
• Unpack it with a bzip2 unpacking tool (e.g. 7zip),
• Read the Microsoft TrueType Corefonts EULA, and have a short prayer to the almighty Bill,
• Upload the contents of the directory contutto_msfonts to your ContuttoPDF plugin directory. (You can omit the README file as well as the LICENSE.* files.),
• Make sure the folder dompdf/lib/fonts and all of its contents are writable by the webserver (very important!),
• Go to http://<yourblog>/wp-content/plugins/contuttopdf/msfonts.php and follow the instructions
• When the process of including the font files is finished successfully, you can use the fonts in your theme’s style-print.css

Note: Whenever you define one of these font families, it will be embedded into the PDF files. This will significantly increase the file sizes of your PDFs. So take it easy on the fonts and limit your template to 2 or 3 fonts.

Many thanks to the parties whose software is included in this package

• Microsoft
• The ttf2pt1 project
• The Freetype project
• The zlib project

In case you have troubles with this package, please contact us, or leave a comment at the latest release announcement page.

In case you need individual, advanced support: Contutto also provides professional support for this software and its integration on your website (as well as WordPress support in general). Please don’t hesitate to contact us and ask about our services.