How to get rid of Helvetica in iText XMLWorker?

Question

We use iText to create PDF files from Java code, which in most cases works very well. A few days ago, we started generating PDF / A instead of the usual PDF files that all fonts should embed. The IText Document mainly consists of custom PdfPTable and other classes where we directly manage fonts. All fonts used are created from TTF files downloaded using the following code: this works great:

  private BaseFont load(String path) { try { URL fontResource = PrintSettings.class.getResource(path); if (fontResource == null) { return null; } String fontPath = fontResource.toExternalForm(); BaseFont baseFont = BaseFont.createFont(fontPath, BaseFont.IDENTITY_H, BaseFont.EMBEDDED); baseFont.setSubset(true); return baseFont; } catch (DocumentException ex) { Logger.getLogger(PrintSettings.class).warn("..."); } catch (IOException ex) { Logger.getLogger(PrintSettings.class).warn("..."); } return FontFactory.getFont(PrintSettings.FONT, "UTF-8", true, 8f, Font.NORMAL, PrintSettings.COLOR_TEXT).getBaseFont(); } 

Now we use one specific type of content in the PDF that is generated from the HTML code. We use XMLWorker to process this part. This worked fine if we did not insert fonts. But with PDF / A, we need to insert all the fonts, and now we are struggling with an unknown source of using Helvetica .

We tried to solve this problem using our own FontProvider class, like this one:

 public class PrintFontProvider extends FontFactoryImp { @Override public Font getFont(String fontName, String encoding, boolean embedded, float size, int style, BaseColor color, boolean cached) { // LiberationSans – http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_(Schriftart) – http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?item_id=OFL_web if (style == Font.NORMAL) return new Font(this.load("fonts/Liberation/LiberationSans-Regular.ttf"), size, Font.NORMAL, color); if (style == Font.BOLD) return new Font(this.load("fonts/Liberation/LiberationSans-Bold.ttf"), size, Font.NORMAL, color); if (style == Font.BOLDITALIC) return new Font(this.load("fonts/Liberation/LiberationSans-BoldItalic.ttf"), size, Font.NORMAL, color); if (style == Font.ITALIC) return new Font(this.load("fonts/Liberation/LiberationSans-Italic.ttf"), size, Font.NORMAL, color); return new Font(this.load("fonts/Liberation/LiberationSans-Regular.ttf"), size, style, color); } private BaseFont load(String path) { ... } } 

It is associated with XMLWorker using the following code:

 HtmlPipelineContext html = new HtmlPipelineContext(null); html.setTagFactory(Tags.getHtmlTagProcessorFactory()); CSSResolver css = XMLWorkerHelper.getInstance().getDefaultCssResolver(true); // We need to control the FontProdiver! html.setCssAppliers(new CssAppliersImpl(new PrintFontProvider())); Pipeline<?> pipeline = new CssResolverPipeline(css, new HtmlPipeline(html, new PdfWriterPipeline(this.document, writer))); XMLWorker worker = new XMLWorker(pipeline, true); XMLParser p = new XMLParser(worker); p.parse(new ByteArrayInputStream(StringUtils.iTextHTML(string).getBytes())); 

Most simple HTML elements work this way ... but there are some that seem to ignore FontProvider and continue to use Helvetica , which will not be embedded in PDF / A (we don't have this font). For example, <ol><li>...</li></ol> use this.

 Caused by: com.itextpdf.text.pdf.PdfXConformanceException: All the fonts must be embedded. This one isn't: Helvetica at com.itextpdf.text.pdf.internal.PdfXConformanceImp.checkPDFXConformance(PdfXConformanceImp.java:225) at com.itextpdf.text.pdf.PdfWriter.addSimple(PdfWriter.java:2192) at com.itextpdf.text.pdf.PdfContentByte.setFontAndSize(PdfContentByte.java:1444) at com.itextpdf.text.pdf.PdfDocument.writeLineToContent(PdfDocument.java:1463) at com.itextpdf.text.pdf.ColumnText.go(ColumnText.java:968) at com.itextpdf.text.pdf.ColumnText.go(ColumnText.java:841) at com.itextpdf.text.pdf.ColumnText.showTextAligned(ColumnText.java:1189) at com.itextpdf.text.pdf.ColumnText.showTextAligned(ColumnText.java:1208) at com.itextpdf.text.pdf.PdfDocument.flushLines(PdfDocument.java:1193) at com.itextpdf.text.pdf.PdfDocument.newPage(PdfDocument.java:830) at com.itextpdf.text.Document.newPage(Document.java:367) 

I ran out of ideas how to get rid of Helvetica at the moment ... trying to solve this within 8 hours ... more ideas?

Answer 1

I dug a little deeper and went from OrderedUnorderedList to ListItem to List ...

 /** * Adds an <CODE>Element</CODE> to the <CODE>List</CODE>. * * @param o the element to add. * @return true if adding the object succeeded * @since 5.0.1 (signature changed to use Element) */ @Override public boolean add(final Element o) { if (o instanceof ListItem) { ListItem item = (ListItem) o; if (this.numbered || this.lettered) { Chunk chunk = new Chunk(this.preSymbol, this.symbol.getFont()); chunk.setAttributes(this.symbol.getAttributes()); int index = this.first + this.list.size(); if ( this.lettered ) chunk.append(RomanAlphabetFactory.getString(index, this.lowercase)); else chunk.append(String.valueOf(index)); chunk.append(this.postSymbol); item.setListSymbol(chunk); } else { item.setListSymbol(this.symbol); } item.setIndentationLeft(this.symbolIndent, this.autoindent); item.setIndentationRight(0); return this.list.add(item); } else if (o instanceof List) { List nested = (List) o; nested.setIndentationLeft(nested.getIndentationLeft() + this.symbolIndent); this.first--; return this.list.add(nested); } return false; } 

This code refers to this.symbol.getFont() , which is set to undefined when the class is initialized ...

 public class List implements TextElementArray, Indentable { [...] /** This is the listsymbol of a list that is not numbered. */ protected Chunk symbol = new Chunk("- "); 

I just used another Chunk constructor that accepts Font mine and voila ... SOLVED . The numbered list no longer uses Helvetica , but my own font, which is correctly embedded.

It took me age! Another way is to implement our own tag processor for <ol> , but we don’t have time for this. I will write an error report for this ... we will see if it will be fixed a little more flexible.