Depending on how the PDF is generated, the required fonts may or may not be embedded. Usually, the standard or base PostScript fonts are not embedded, because they're assumed to be on the target system's viewer or printer, but non-standard fonts more typically are embedded. Systems that don't have the expected fonts should substitute with the closest match, which may or may not work well depending on how close the match is. On Windows, the closest match to Helvetica is Arial, which is supposed to have compatible font metrics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arial). When it comes to generating a PDF, the system needs to have the font installed, and it needs to be a font that allows embedding, if you want the system to embed the font in the PDF. For non-embedded fonts, I think it just needs the font metrics, which it should have for the base PostScript fonts. Many PDF generators have an option for forcing the embedding of fonts, but that only works for fonts that are installed and embeddable.
I'm not familiar with Jasper and how it generates its PDF output, but perhaps you'll find some helpful tips on this page: http://superuser.com/questions/39167/how-to-embed-arial-in-pdf-when-pdf-has-...
On 09/03/2015 11:54 AM, Wyatt Zacharias wrote:
I'm not all that familiar with the typography world, so I'm hoping someone can lend some insight into a problem I'm having.
We have pdf reports generated by Jasper which are created using the Helvetica font. My main problem, is a report generated by Jasper on Windows is slightly different than the one generated by Jasper on Linux. I'm guessing this is an issue with something other than the fonts, but to be sure, my question is does the system generating the pdf need the font installed to use that font? I assume not, since I can inspect the pdf with Acrobat, or the pdffonts command and it confirms that the font used is Helvetica.
My second question, is if the pdf is being created properly, would it render improperly on a desktop that does not have Helvetica installed? If I need to have the font installed, where can I find plain old Helvetica? As I said, I'm not familiar with typography, but I can find every variety out there of helvetica, except straight up "Helvetica".