Support for Font Awesome and Glyphicons by default (and perhaps other icon fonts) about mpdf

[jamesfairhurst]

I've managed to get Font Awesome working by using composer to pull in the package "fortawesome/font-awesome": "*", defined a custom path when building the PDF:

define('_MPDF_SYSTEM_TTFONTS_CONFIG', FULL_PATH_TO_FILE);
$mpdf = new Mpdf();
...

Then included the font files in that file:

<?php

$this->fontdata['fontawesome'] = array(
    // relative to the mpdf fonts dir
    'R' => "/../../../fortawesome/font-awesome/fonts/fontawesome-webfont.ttf",
    'I' => "/../../../fortawesome/font-awesome/fonts/fontawesome-webfont.ttf",
);

Then finally in the html I can use:

<span class="fa fa-phone" style="font-family: fontawesome;">&#xf095;</span>
<span style="font-family: fontawesome;">&#xf095;</span>

Note the class isn't actually required, but useful for quickly knowing what icon it is. Hope that helps others whilst 7 is in development.

[marclaporte]

A good use case for packages: #552

[marclaporte]

Larger discussion about font handling should go here: https://github.com/mpdf/mpdf/wiki/Font-handling-in-mPDF

[mquadrat]

AFAIK mpdf does not support the :before css selector which is needed to correctly display Bootstrap icons. So some preprocessing might be needed.

[marclaporte]

Is this a lot of work?

[jonnybradley]

Looks like that's it, thanks for the clues! I managed to get some FA icons to appear in the mPDF output by using this html in the source page for the flag icon:

<span class="fa fa-fw ">&#xf024</span>

and this in config_fonts.php font data array:

'fontawesome' => array(
    'R' => 'fontawesome-webfont.ttf',
),

So, we (Tiki) could do some preprocessing on our pages to render the icons like this before sending the page to "print", but a solution in mPDF would obviously be preferable so it would work for everyone.

Thanks for getting the ball rolling on this @marclaporte

[garak]

The current way of handling font is ugly. This library should avoid shipping fonts and be flexible about font location, since we cant's put stuff in vendor directory by hand

[finwe]

Yes, all this is planned for version 7.0 (currently unfortunately without roadplan). See https://github.com/mpdf/mpdf/blob/namespaces/src/Config/ConfigVariables.php#L410 (plus potential availability to list multiple sources).

[finwe]

Anyway, @garak, you can set custom font path in <7.0 with _MPDF_TTFONTPATH constant.

[garak]

Also, setting variables with constants is ugly 😢
Hope to see a roadmap for 7.0 soon

[finwe]

Moved font handling to separate issue #146

Roadmap for 7.0 can be seen at https://github.com/mpdf/mpdf/milestones/7.0 - with no due date, however, as I expect new issues will follow

[dimvic]

something in the lines of

$data = file_get_contents('path/to/fontawesome/variables.less');
$data = trim(implode("\n", array_map(function($v) { return preg_replace('/^(?:(?!fa-var).)*$/', '', $v); }, explode("\n", $data))));
$data = strtr($data, ['@fa-var'=>'fa', '\\'=>'&#x', '-'=>'_', '"'=>'']);
$data = preg_replace('/\s*:\s*/', ':', $data);
foreach (explode("\n", $data) as $line) {
    list($var, $val) = explode(':', $line);
    ${$var} = $val;
}

can help produce more readable templates

<span style="font-family: fontawesome;"><?php echo $fa_plus; ?></span>

[marclaporte]

Since we'll no longer use the Github wiki, I am copying below the content from https://github.com/mpdf/mpdf/wiki/Font-handling-in-mPDF which was written by Daniel James

---

This is to brainstorm on how to improve font handling in mPDF

Related links

• Support for Font Awesome and Glyphicons by default (and perhaps other icon fonts)

The mPDF font configuration needs to be more flexible so it
can take account of whichever fonts are available locally or via
@font-face. We might start this by creating configuration snippets for
popular fonts, which can be inserted into the mPDF configuration
automatically if the corresponding file names are present in the font path.

In general, mPDF should not bundle any fonts itself, as this makes
redistribution difficult (for example Debian or Ubuntu already ship some
of mPDF's fonts, but not others, and these distros don't want to ship
duplicates). It also means that the bundled fonts can get stale, which
is particularly an issue for icon fonts which are updated regularly with
new glyphs.

My suggestion would be to provide mPDF with scripts that can download
the required fonts at installation time, for example
https://packages.debian.org/jessie/fonts-font-awesome if your server
runs Debian. Most Western users do not need the CJK or Arabic fonts,
which are the biggest downloads.

[minhtkh]

In my project, I have to stick with version 6 for now. To work around, I use @shark0der 's answer from here but modify a bit.
Instead of importing all library fonts, I define relative path to customised fonts from vendor/mpdf/mpdf/ttfonts/.

            $mpdf = new \mPDF('UTF-8');
            $fontdata['test'] = [
                // in this case it's resources folder in Laravel project
                'R' => '../../../../resources/assets/fonts/test.ttf',
                'I' => '../../../../resources/assets/fonts/test.ttf',
            ];
            foreach ($fontdata as $f => $fs) {
                $mpdf->fontdata[$f] = $fs;
                foreach (['R', 'B', 'I', 'BI'] as $style) {
                    if (isset($fs[$style]) && $fs[$style]) {
                        $mpdf->available_unifonts[] = $f . trim($style, 'R');
                    }
                }
            }
            $mpdf->default_available_fonts = $mpdf->available_unifonts;

I also don't need to define _MPDF_TTFONTPATH