Install new or common fonts

The best results are achieved if the fonts on the server where Genero Report Engine (GRE) is installed and those used in the Genero Report Designer (GRD) are the same.

• If GRE and GRD are installed on the same machine, there is no problem.
• If GRE and GRD are installed on different machines that have the same operating system and the same installed fonts, there is no problem.

On Windows™ systems you can use the scripts that are provided to get information about the available fonts.

A report that uses only a few positioned items will still lay out correctly, however, even if the fonts used in the Designer and the fonts used in the GRE server differ:

• If the server cannot find a specified font, it does not raise an error; it uses a fallback font instead. A warning has been added to the runtime system in debugging mode ($GREDEBUG > 0) when a fallback font is used because a font specified in a template file cannot be found on the system.
• If no font is specified, a default font is used.

Specify a font at the root of the document, to avoid potentially changing output when a new version of Java™, or a different server, is used. In the Report Designer, set the font property for the Page Root node.

Not all fonts contain all possible characters: some fonts will not contain certain glyphs. In this case, GRE will attempt to take the missing characters from a different font that contains the glyphs. For example, the monospaced (fixed-width) font "Courier" does not contain graphics characters. If a report contains a grid that is drawn using graphics characters, GRE might substitute characters from a set that is not fixed-width, causing the layout to break. Avoid this problem by using a font like "Lucida Sans Typewriter", which is both fixed-width and contains the required characters.

Not all fonts can be used for embedding in PDF: the license flag contained in the font might prevent a font from being used. The utility $<GREDIR>/bin/fontinfopdf lists all fonts that can be used in PDF documents. While True Type fonts generally work, sometimes a Type 1 font will not appear in the list because it is available only as text (.pfa) but not as a binary file (.pfb). In this case, the binary font can be created by using font compilation tools such as pfa2pfb or t1binary from the t1binaries package.