[Mapserver-users] Text labels do not appear in PDF output

[Zak James]

I'm going on very hazy memory of this, but I think that the decision 
was taken to use truetype fonts in the pdf output to maintain 
consistency with maps rendered using gd (with freetype). Of course, 
that means that the fonts must be embedded as all but the 13 'standard' 
type 1 fonts must be in any pdf document.

Pdflib does have mechanisms to reduce the size of embedded type by 
doing things like only including glyphs that exist in the document or 
mapping truetype fonts to standard type 1 equivalents. Unfortunately 
you would need to modify mappdf.c to change the default behaviour. You 
could also do post-processing of the pdf files to optimize them for 
size and render time; I think there are commercial software tools 
available specifically for that purpose. Maybe that's another solution 
if you don't want to modify the code.

Since the mapserver pdf code is not receiving much attention, I think a 
lot of users have taken matters into their own hands for getting 
exactly the output they want.

zak
--
Zak James
Applications and Software Development
DM Solutions Group Inc.
http://www.dmsolutions.ca


On May 27, 2004, at 1:30 AM, Antti.Roppola at brs.gov.au wrote:

> Dear all,
>
> Explicitly including label fonts (using FreeType) works in PDF
> renders. Embedding the font is a pain though, as it doubles the
> size of the page. It doesn't seem like I can use Type 1 fonts.
> This is annoying since PDF readers don't need to have Type 1 fonts
> included in documents.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Antti
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Antti.Roppola at brs.gov.au [mailto:Antti.Roppola at brs.gov.au]
> Sent: Wednesday, 26 May 2004 4:29 PM
> To: mapserver-users at lists.gis.umn.edu
> Subject: [Mapserver-users] Text labels do not appear in PDF output
>
>
> Hello all,
>
> I am generating PDF maps using Mapserver (CGI 4.0.1 with
> libpdf and freetype built in. Town names appear correctly
> on the PNG output, but do not appear at all on the PDF output.
> The point markers do appear.. I am not using True Type fonts,
> or any kind of font declarations at all for that matter (just
> size and colour).
>
> Any hints on how to get labels working in PDF? Do I need to
> explicitly use fonts or something? (that's my next test)
>
> Thanks,
>
> Antti
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