Hello crews, I'm developing a cross-platform Java application that heavily relies on PDF rendering. During last 3 years, I tried several different Java PDF renderers and couldn't find anything that would satisfy my major requirement: high-quality rendering in plain Java. I'm currently using a library that relies on native components.
After some research, I came to the conclusion that the biggest hurdle in the Java PDF rendering is the absence of a good font handling library in plain Java. JVM/AWT implementation is poor and in some cases just buggy (Oracle JDK). Java PDF rendering projects have to choose between FreeType (which is written in C) and its own ad-hoc solutions like JPedal does. I'm glad that pdfbox team has made with fontbox a big step towards a good font handling Java library. I would like to step in and help out in order to improve it further. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to locate any public information about fontbox development plans. Therefore, I decided to ask this here. Question 1: Fontbox in its current shape is a kind of low-level library. It lacks a high-level API that abstracts away low-level font layout and offers methods for obtaining font/glyph information and for performing format-independent rendering. Such a high-level API would permit better modularization of the pdfbox library and external usage of fontbox. Question 2: It looks like fontbox currently doesn't perform grid-fitting/hinting. Glyph outlines will be rendered directly skipping all TT instructions. Is there any plans to implement grid-fitting? Please feel free to correct me if I wrote something wrong. Thank you in advance! Best regards Max
