Apache™ FOP (Formatting Objects Processor) is, I believe, the best available tool to generate PDF output from XML files (especially DocBook documents, when used with the DocBook XSL stylesheets. However, its default configuration doesn’t use the best-looking fonts, and so the resulting output is not really nice to read.
FOP can make use of any TrueType font available on the system, but
a little work is needed: for each TrueType font, one must ① generate a FOP
metrics file, and ② add an appropriate stanza in FOP’s configuration file to
make him aware of that font. FOP comes with a program called
TTFReader (in the org.apache.fop.fonts.apps.TTFReader
class) to generate a FOP metrics file from a TTF file, but the second step is
left to the user, and the whole process can be quite tiresome.
To facilitate the use of TrueType fonts with FOP, I wrote a small shell script ttf2fop that takes care of calling TTFReader and generate the required lines to insert into FOP’s configuration file. Calling that script with a list of TTF files will automatically generate all the corresponding FOP metrics files and print to standard output the configuration stanza.
Here is the script 1:
ttf2fop.sh (text/x-shellscript, 2.8K)
For example, to make all the DeJaVu fonts available to FOP:
$ ttf2fop /usr/share/fonts/DeJaVu*.ttf > dejavu.xml
That command would generate all the metrics files in
/usr/share/fop/fonts/ (you can use the -d flag to
install them elsewhere, if you don’t have write access to that directory), and
a XML configuration fragment in the dejavu.xml file. Insert the
contents of that file in FOP’s configuratin file, in the
fop/renderers/renderer[mime="application/pdf"]/fonts node. (If
you don’t have a FOP configuration file already, use the default file
conf/fop.xconf bundled inside the FOP’s archive.)
To use the newly available fonts when processing a DocBook document, either use command-line parameters when calling your XSLT processor, or use a customization layer such as the following:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" xmlns:fo="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Format" version="1.0"> <xsl:import href="http://docbook.sourceforge.net/release/xsl-ns/1.76.0/fo/docbook.xsl" /> <xsl:param name="body.font.family">DejaVuSerifCondensed</xsl:param> <xsl:param name="title.font.family">DejaVuSansCondensed</xsl:param> <xsl:param name="monospace.font.family">DejaVuSansMono</xsl:param> </xsl:stylesheet>