How can I stop Apache FOP leaking in missing fonts to my PDF

[stefan-jung]

Hi, the followings fonts are leaking into my PDF file. I don't have these fonts and they are not mentioned in my fop.xconf and my font-mappings.xml.

• Courier-Bold
• Helvetica-Bold
• Times-Roman

I have to provide a PDF/X-compatible file. For certain reasons, font auto-detection in Apache FOP is deactivated in my fop.xconf. BTW: You can use this XML Schema to validate your personal fop.xconf file: fop-configuration.zip. It has been extracted from the Apache FOP sources.

I tried to explicitly exclude them in my fop.xconf, but this did not work as expected. Do you have an idea?

Update 1: I have now learned that these fonts are, so-called, base14 fonts. To learn a little bit about the history, you should read this interesting article The Scourge of Arial - Mark Simonson (February 21st, 2001). In a PDF/X file, all fonts need to be embedded, including the base14 fonts. These fonts are, for example, shipped with Ghostscript, you can find them in this Ghostscript Git repository: git.ghostscript.com/?p=user/tor/core35.git.

NOTE: Per PDF/Postscript specification, these base14 fonts must be available, see Apache FOP - Base-14-Fonts. This means, probably the only way to provide a proper PDF/X is to embed the base14 fonts.

[stefan-jung]

The solution to be able to convert the file to a compliant PDF/X4 file with Adobe Acrobat Preflight was to embed the full fonts, not only a subset. I needed to set the embedding-mode attribute to full in my fop.xconf. Beforehand, Adobe Acrobat scrambled the text in the document.

<font kerning="yes" embed-url="Simsun.ttf" embedding-mode="full">
    <font-triplet name="Simsun" style="normal" weight="normal"/>
</font>