KB-005 - What if fonts are not on the Server

If you are running your product on a Unix or Linux server and the word rtf file has some windows font (i.e. windings) that are not on the server, does the document still render?

It Depends

This is an interesting question. And the answer is, it depends. The server needs the fonts to get the font metrics (the size of each glyph). So first off, if you install wingdings on the server, then it works fine for all situations.

If you don’t have wingdings, then it will use the best match it can find. In the case of wingdings it will use symbol. In the case of Arial, it will use Helvetica. Sometimes these mapped fonts are very close, sometimes they are not. This difference matters primarily for pdf & text reports.

For other output formats, the final report file does not have line breaks in it. In rtf & WordML Word will handle all line breaks when it displays. For html the browser will. Same for xls and SpreadsheetML and Excel. So you should have no problems in the final report, assuming the system it is viewed on has the required font.

For pdf (and text) the font metrics are used to determine the length of text to place soft line breaks and the height of text to place page breaks. The closer the substituted font matches the true font, the more accurate this will be. If it is a lose match, and there is no character formatting within a paragraph, and the paragraphs are left aligned, you might see no difference. But you are generally going to have problems in this situation.

Finally for pdf you can set the system to use either Acrobat’s internal fonts or to embed the fonts used in the final pdf file. The pdf will look well laid out in this case, but it will use the fonts from the server. This is not a good solution if you need wingdings but is a very good solution when mapping Arial to Helvetica.

So the bottom line is that for formats other than pdf and text, it should not be a problem if a font is not on the server. For pdf and text, you want to install the needed font on the server unless it is an identity mapping like Arial to Helvetica.

Where do I get fonts?

We suggest you contact the company that sold you your operating system as this is different for each O/S. You must install the fonts, it is not sufficient to just copy them to your system.