19.2. Internal Fonts

The Unicode range of the displayed text in PDF documents must be covered by the embedded font.

Unfortunately, at present there is no native outline font that can display all Unicode characters. The one exception is GNU Unifont, which does support the full 65,536 Unicode code point range. However, the glyphs originate from a bitmap of 16 pixels high and either 8 or 16 pixels wide, which gives the font a coarser look.

SavaPage contains internal fonts covering specific Unicode Scripts. These fonts can be selected to customize PDF output to the content locale.

19.2.1. Default Font

The default font for PDF output is DejaVu Sans, which supports a broad set of Unicode scripts:

  • Latin (including European and African alphabets, IPA, ...)

  • Greek (including polytonic)

  • Cyrillic

  • Armenian

  • Georgian

  • Hebrew

  • Arabic

  • N'ko

  • Lao

  • Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics

  • Ogham

  • Tifinagh

  • Lisu

Next to that, DejaVu also contains a lot of mathematical and other symbols, arrows, braille patterns, etc.

Tip

Coverage of the default font can be seen in DejaVuSans.pdf.

19.2.2. CJK Font

Support for Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) is provided by the Droid Sans "fallback" font. This font contains over 43,000 glyphs and includes support for Simplified Chinese (GB2312), Traditional Chinese (Big 5), Japanese (JIS 0208) and Korean (KSC 5601). The font uses the Simplified Chinese ideographs for shared Unicode code points.

Tip

Coverage of the CJK font can be seen in DroidSansFallbackFull.pdf.

19.2.3. Unifont

GNU Unifont is a Unicode font with a glyph for every visible Unicode Basic Multilingual Plane code point. The Unicode Basic Multilingual Plane covers the first 65,536 (or 2^16) Unicode code points. GNU Unifont originates from a bitmap font with glyphs of 16 pixels high and either 8 or 16 pixels wide. Therefore it has a coarser look than native outline fonts.