Tips for installing fonts

The best results are achieved if the fonts on the server where Genero Report Engine (GRE) is installed and those used in the Genero Report Designer (GRD) are the same. If these are on different systems, you may need to install fonts.

You don't need to install fonts if:

  • GRE and GRD are installed on the same machine, or
  • GRE and GRD are installed on different machines that have the same operating system and the same installed fonts.
Tip:

To get information about the available fonts, use the fontinfo and fontinfopdf commands in the $GREDIR/bin directory.

Even if the fonts used in the GRD and the GRE server differ, the report might still display correctly especially if it has only a few positioned items. However:

  • If the server cannot find a specified font, it does not raise an error but uses a fallback font. A warning has been added to the runtime system in debugging mode ($GREDEBUG > 0) when a fallback font is used because a font specified in a template file cannot be found on the system.
  • If no font is specified, a default font is used.

If the font is not available, you can install it with the procedure specified by the vendor.

Tip:

On Linux® and macOS™, you can check the available fonts using the fc-list tool.

Fonts available across systems

You can avoid some of the problems by using fonts that work across operating systems:

Lucida family of Fonts
SUN-Java contains a basic set of fonts (Serif, Sans Serif and Monospaced) in the "Lucida" family. Some distributions of the Java™ Runtime Environment do not contain all fonts, but it is legal to copy the fonts from one distribution to another. These fonts contain a large part of the Unicode characters.

The available codes are listed in http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/guide/intl/font.html#lucida.

Liberation fonts
Another option for free fonts is the "Liberation" fonts originally provided by Red Hat®. These fonts have the same metrics (character width) as the Microsoft™ fonts Arial, Times New Roman, and Courier, and a similar look. These fonts can be installed on both Windows® and Linux. A description of the fonts can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_fonts. The fonts can be downloaded at http://fedorahosted.org/liberation-fonts/.