Fonts

Text people write in the viewer, in a text box, a callout, a form field or a redaction label, shows while they type in the very font the PDF will carry, letter for letter, so what they see is what they save. Characters a font doesn’t have come from fallback fonts, so text in any language shows, right to left where it reads that way.

Choosing a font#

The style panel’s font picker offers every font text can be written in, in three groups:

Group	The fonts
In this document	The PDF’s own fonts that new text can be written in
Your fonts	The ones you give the viewer, and the engine’s own
Standard	Helvetica, Times and Courier, which every PDF app has

Most PDFs carry only the characters their text uses, so their fonts can’t be used for new text, and the picker doesn’t offer them. A box that already has such a font keeps it: the picker shows it as the box’s font, greyed, with why it can’t be chosen for another box.

Your fonts#

Give the viewer your brand’s typeface, or a font for a script the standard fonts don’t cover, and the picker offers it under Your fonts:

{
  fonts: [
    { key: 'brand-sans', url: '/fonts/BrandSans-Regular.ttf', label: 'Brand Sans' },
    { key: 'noto-sc', url: '/fonts/NotoSansSC-Regular.otf', label: 'Noto Sans SC' },
  ],
}

Field	What it is	Default
`key`	Your name for the font: what a text box’s `fontFamily` names it by. Not one of the standard names, such as `helvetica`.	required
`url`	Where the TTF or OTF file is, on your site or a server that allows it (CORS)	`url` or `data`
`data`	The file’s bytes, in place of `url`
`familyName`	The family the PDF names it by	read from the file
`weight`, `italic`	Its style	read from the file
`label`	What the picker calls it	its family’s name

Each file is fetched once, when the viewer starts. Saving puts only the characters people used into the PDF.

Text in any language#

Hebrew and Arabic work with no setup: the engine fills them in from Noto Sans Hebrew and Noto Naskh Arabic.

For another script, such as Chinese, give the engine a fallback font, which fills in the characters other fonts lack:

{
  engine: {
    fallbackFonts: [{ key: 'noto-sc', url: '/fonts/NotoSansSC-Regular.otf' }],
  },
}

A character no font has shows as a box, both while typing and in the PDF, so no text is lost without a trace.

Typed signatures#

A signature typed in the signature maker is written in a handwriting font. Pick the fonts it offers with plugins.signature.fonts; see Signatures.

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