Details for using fonts / Unicode fonts

As it took me quite a while to figure this out and the documentation seems to be gone, I'll try to summarize what I found:

tFPDF can use "built in" fonts, that is (to my understanding) whereever a PDF is going to be printed, there will be those fonts at minimum:

Courier, Helvetica (= Arial), Times, Symbol, Zapf Dingbats - including their bold and italics versions.

If you want other fonts, I would get them from Google Werbfont helper but you're fine with other fonts as long it's True Type - and remember that your particular glyphs (cyrillic, greek or the like) are included inside the TTF file if you want to print them!

You will have to place those font files as a True Type Font (.ttf) and only using small caps, no spaces in the filename inside a certain font folder. Usually, you need an extra file for bold and another one for italic letters. Where should that folder be placed?

If you install tFPDF via composer (as we should)

composer require setasign/tfpdf

or even otherwise, a font folder

vendor/setasign/fpdf/font

will be created, containing a subfolder "unifont"

However, for security reasons (vendor folder with PHP code not being directly reachable via a browser request) you should better be placing the "vendor" folder next to the "public" folder containing the web root - but that has nothing to do with tFPDF.

To put your own fonts inside the file tree "vendor" generated by composer is not such a great idea because if you delete that "vendor" folder without much thought in order to recreate it, your fonts will be gone.

Better set a custom font path in the PHP code, like

define('FPDF_FONTPATH', '/www/htdocs/mydomain/font/');

Then copy all the files from abovementioned default "font" folder here, then add your ttf file in the "unifont" folder inside "font", for example source-sans-3-v15-latin_latin-ext-regular.ttf

The "unifont" folder must contain the newest code file "ttfonts.php" from the software package, so remember to update that if composer updates the tftpd package!

My PDF generation code usually starts like this:

$pdf = new tFPDF($orientation = 'P', $unit = 'mm', $format = 'A4');
$pdf->AliasNbPages();
$pdf->AddPage();
$pdf->AddFont('SourceSans', '', 'source-sans-3-v15-latin_latin-ext-regular.ttf', true);
$pdf->AddFont('SourceSansB', 'B', 'source-sans-3-v15-latin_latin-ext-700.ttf', true);
$pdf->SetDisplayMode('real');

When tFPDF tries to access your TTF font for the first time, it has to calculate some metrics and produce special font files ending with .mtx.php , .cw.dat and .cw127.php - therefor the webserver must be able to write into that folder!

Also if you install a new version of a ttf file, delete the corresponding old files .mtx.php, .cw.dat and .cw127.php so they may get regenerated.

Setasign / tFPDF

Details for using fonts / Unicode fonts #14