Working with Fonts

Important

This section represents information presented with the very limited understanding of the program’s author — certainly, any feedback to help correct it and make it clearer will be more than welcome!

The Basics

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Apart from the Built-In Fonts, each time you want to use a different font in your script, you’ll first need to declare it.

If you are using the Text command, the font can be setup as follows:

Text("Hello World!", font_name="Arial", font_size=48, stroke="red")

If you do not supply the font properties, they will default to:

  • font_name - Helvetica

  • font_size - 12 (points)

  • stroke - black

If you want to set the font for a whole section of script, then using the Font command you can set this up as follows:

Font(name="Arial", size=48, stroke="red")

In this case, the properties are similar but the “font_” prefix is not needed.

Note

Font names, and their associated file names, should be considered as case-sensitive!

Built-In Fonts

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Because protograf uses PyMuPDF to generate the PDF output, it has access to a number of “built-in” fonts that should exist in any PDF viewer.

These fonts are:

  • Helvetica - a basic sanserif font (the default for protograf)

  • Times-Roman - a basic serif font

  • Courier - a basic fixed-width font

  • Symbol - a variety of custom lettering

  • ZapfDingbats - a variety of “dingbats” (mini-images)

The names to use in the Font command are - especially if you want to display bold or italic styles are:

  • Courier

  • Courier-Oblique

  • Courier-Bold

  • Courier-BoldOblique

  • Helvetica

  • Helvetica-Oblique

  • Helvetica-Bold

  • Helvetica-BoldOblique

  • Times-Roman

  • Times-Italic

  • Times-Bold

  • Times-BoldItalic

  • Symbol

  • ZapfDingbats

As far as possible, all examples supplied with protograf make use of these fonts, so that they can be run and used anywhere.

Note

Be aware that some PDF viewers may not render some, or all, of the characters when using Symbol or ZapfDingbats. Also, the glyph (visual) images will be specific to every viewer.

CJK Fonts

CJK fonts (China, Japan, Korea) may be available and installed on some machines, depending on the OS and the PDF viwer in use. If they are, they can be referred to as follows:

  • Heiti - simplified Chinese

  • Song - simplified Chinese (serif)

  • Fangti - traditional Chinese

  • Ming - traditional Chinese (serif)

  • Gothic - Japanese

  • Mincho - Japanese (serif)

  • Dotum - Korean

  • Batang - Korean (serif)

Using Additional Fonts

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It is possible to install additional fonts into an operating system. Once installed, these could then be used in a protograf script.

However, there are some limitations:

  • The font should be installed into the standard location(s) for that operating system, so that it can be “auto-discovered”.

  • The font must be referred to correctly; for example, the Ubuntu font is not actually available as Ubuntu but rather as Ubuntu-L, Ubuntu-R and Ubuntu-M for the light, regular and medium styles.

On an Ubuntu Linux machine, your new font file could be installed into the /home/USERNAME/.local/share/fonts directory.

Font Registration

The first time that a non-default font — one that is installed specifically on your machine — is referred to, protograf will need to check all available font files to find it - this can take some time!

After this, a copy of all the fonts’ information is stored in a single file in the settings location used by protograf (usually in a sub-directory called .protograph located in your home directory). This will speed up the font checking process significantly for future.

However, if you later on install new font(s) onto your machine, you will need to force the fonts information file to be recreated so it has access to the new font(s).

Use the property cached_fonts=False in the script’s Create command e.g.

Create(
    cached_fonts=False
)

Alternatively, you can also used the --fonts option when using Python to process your script:

python myscript.py --fonts

In either case, you should get feedback from the script about this process:

FEEDBACK:: Setting up fonts ... ... ... please be patient!

Common Font Styles

In addition to a font’s default appearance — sometimes termed regular — a font often has bold or italic — sometimes termed oblique — styling that can be used together with this default.

There can also be a combined version of these styles — for example, BoldItalic or BoldOblique — that is useful when both styles must be applied together.

These files for these styles usually have an appended suffix like -Bold or B. protograf will attempt to discover and register both bold and italic files, to create what is termed a “font family”, but there is no guarantee that all these files exist for every family!

When any or all of these styles are accessed, they will be registered as being part of the same “font family”; and the command to make the family available is:

Font(name='Merriweather')

(This example assumes you would have downloaded and installed the font files for the Merriweather font from https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Merriweather )

If you need to use a specific style for a text box, append the style to the font’s family name; for example:

Text(text='Hello World', font_name="Merriweather-Bold")

Supplementary Fonts

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As suggested in Setting Up , if you’re running on a Linux operating system, you can consider using a command such as:

sudo apt-get install ttf-mscorefonts-installer

In this case, when the Create command runs, it will automatically try to register the following fonts:

  • Arial

  • Verdana

  • Courier New

  • Times New Roman

  • Trebuchet MS

  • Georgia

  • Webdings

If you are running on a Windows operating system, these fonts should already be installed and usable.

On Ubuntu Linux these font files are typically installed into the /usr/share/fonts directory.

If you do not install these fonts, or have them already installed, you may see a warning message every time you run a script:

WARNING:: Unable to register the MS font(s): Arial, Verdana,
Courier New, Times New Roman, Trebuchet MS, Georgia, Webdings

Word Processor fonts vs protograf

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In some cases, you’ll notice that a font can be displayed with bold or italic styling in a word processor, even though it cannot be displayed the same way in protograf. The reason is that PyMuPDF does not create an “artificial” font style if it cannot find a matching file for italic or bold version of the font.

The long answer was supplied in a Reddit post (https://www.reddit.com/r/fonts/comments/1dzlhl0/) which is paraphrased below:

Question: Why do some fonts have a separate “bold” or “italics” version, when you can just format the main font for the same effect? When I download a new font, there’s often a few variants included in the ZIP file, most commonly an Italic version & Bold version. But whenever I install just the base font and test if I can italicize/bolden it, it works just fine - and looks the same as the standalone italic/bold versions.

Answer: Depending on the app you’re using, selecting bold or italic will automatically switch to the bold or italic version of the font. If the app doesn’t automatically switch it might artificially bold the font or slant it to be italic. There’s also a big difference between a word processor app putting a generic slant (for italics) or thickness (for bold) on the letters, and the actual font created by designers having considered and crafted what the font should look like in various forms. So, they don’t look at all the same. Set them really large, and you’ll see the difference.

External Font Resources

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Additional fonts are available from:

As always, please check for yourself the details of licenses and restrictions associated with any fonts you choose to use.