[webERP -translation] What's wrong with TCPDF? request for comments

[Javier de Lorenzo-Cáceres]

Maybe I wrote a wrong subject of previous message using the word "conclusion".
I wanted to mean that now we know what TCPDF does and what doesn't.

Fpdf supports only ISO-1 + CJK what limits webERP.
Some Php functions support only a set of isos what limits webERP too.

This leaves turkish out, and some french chars and also many language
combinations.

TCPDF solves many of those cases already, like permitting turkish to coexist
with the other WGL4 languages.

- The future
TCPDF has not reached its full potential; some improvements could be
expected and we guess them. TCPDF needs some development to cover all
cases and it is in the right direction.

- Embedding
TCPDF is not very smart when it comes to embed fonts as it doesn't generate
subsets; embedded fonts are sent complete and compressed, and if we use
bold, italic and bold-italic the size grows proportionally:

dejavusans.z   327 K
dejavusansb.z 298 K
dejavusansi.z  282 K
dejavusansbi.z 282 K

But this permits to edit pdfs since the whole font is available, and other
fonts like almohanad, freesans, freemono and dejavumono are lighter.
This means that using an embedded font avoiding its bold and italic
variations give as an extra weight of (increasing order)

almohanad.z        119 K
freemono              142 K
dejavuserifcondensed 156
dejavuserif            176
dejavusansmono   183

(I think that condensed might be good for reports that needs much info in
little space, and mono is good for numbers)

- Not embedding
TCPDF is not very smart when it comes to not embedded fonts since it only
permits CID fonts.

Also, Acrobat does not has bundled a large collection of CID fonts.
But CID fonts are enough and do right. They are not as rich as Unicode fonts
but they are faster and easily managed and edited since they have
not a variable mb. To install another prefered CID font, you only have to copy
the file to the client computer.

I don't like TCPDF, I love it; I understand that by now, it is only a partial solution
for Zhiguo, but at least he and many others have turkish on their webERP
pdfs and now they are only one step away to have turkish and chinese in the
same webERP pdf report.

javier


 





 












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