4 Managing Fonts in Oracle Reports

4.1 Using Fonts

In Oracle Reports, fonts come into play:

• In Reports Builder, at build time

• In the report's output, at runtime

• In the user interface of Reports Builder

4.1.1 Fonts in Reports Builder

Reports Builder provides a list of fonts that are available on the system in the font picker box.

Figure 4-1 Font list in Reports Builder

Description of "Figure 4-1 Font list in Reports Builder"

On Windows, the font list is derived from the fonts that are installed on the system along with the fonts available on the current default printer. A small printer icon before the font name identifies printer fonts. True Type fonts are associated with a TTF icon.

On UNIX, the font list is derived by querying the X-server display on which the application is running for the available fonts. The command is similar to the UNIX xlsfonts command, which lists all of the available fonts for the X-server display. From this font list, Reports Builder generates a list of usable fonts with the valid style, weight, width, size, and encoding characteristics to match the character set. The character set is driven by the NLS_LANG environment variable. Reports Builder includes only those fonts with an encoding of iso8859-1, unless specified differently in the toolkit resource file, Tk2Motif*fontMapCs. For more information on Tk2Motif*fontMapCs, refer to Section 4.3, "Font Configuration Files".

4.1.2 Fonts in Report Output

During report formatting, fonts associated with the layout objects are first checked against the font alias file, uifont.ali, (refer to Section 4.3, "Font Configuration Files"). If an entry in the font alias file is found, the mapped font is used instead of the original one. The mapped font is then searched for in the list of fonts available on the system or printer. If a particular font is not found, Oracle Reports will look for the nearest matching font under the same character set which can be used instead.

4.1.2.1 Font lookup

On Windows, the font lookup mechanism is simple due to the availability of printer drivers, which have the capability of uploading fonts from the system as needed. Any output from Oracle Reports running on Windows will contain fonts from either one of the following:

• The system

• The printer

For this reason, Oracle Reports considers both the printer and the system fonts when looking for the available fonts.

On UNIX, the fonts available for generating output are either one of the following:

• the fonts available on the printer, specifically the fonts defined in the PPD or TFM files

• if no printer is specified, the fonts available in ScreenPrinter, screenprinter.ppd.

  
  

  See Also: Section 4.3, "Font Configuration Files" Section 3.10.1, "ScreenPrinter"

  
  

4.1.2.1.1 Font lookup algorithm

Figure 4-2 illustrates the process of determining the available fonts for generating report output.

Figure 4-2 Font lookup flow

Description of "Figure 4-2 Font lookup flow"

The following steps describe how Oracle Reports generates a list of the available fonts for generating output (for example, for the screen, printer, or file):

1. Oracle Reports looks in the printer configuration file uiprint.txt for all the printers that are listed for the application. If no printers are defined or available, Oracle Reports uses ScreenPrinter.

   
   

   See Also: Section 4.3, "Font Configuration Files" Section 3.10.1, "ScreenPrinter"

   
   

2. Get their type, version and printer definition file.

3. Check for the existence of these printers in the system.

4. If the printers are present, the printer definition files are loaded and the information in these files is read along with the information related to the fonts available for the printer. If these printers are not found, then Oracle Reports uses ScreenPrinter.

5. The AFM files, which are named the same as the font names given in the PPD files, are searched.

6. If found, Oracle Reports then reads this file for all the valid keywords, checks for their correctness and, in case of any discrepancy, default values are used for those keywords.

7. If the AFM file is not found, Oracle Reports marks the font as unusable.

   
   

   Note: Similarly for PCL printers, the HP printer definition file (glue file) is loaded and all the fonts defined in the file are also loaded. While looking for a font, Oracle Reports searches for an entry in the HPD file with the font name and accordingly takes the font if the TFM file for this font is also found. Otherwise, Oracle Reports matches this font to the closest available one.

   
   

Once the list of available fonts is generated, the mapped font is searched for in this list of fonts and, again, the AFM files are read for the purpose of calculating the text size and weight.

Substituting fonts

If a particular font is needed but not found in the PPD file or if an AFM file is not found, Oracle Reports will look for the nearest matching font according to its matching rules. For example, suppose a report is originally designed with a Simplified Chinese font SimSun and in the uifont.ali file no mapping for this font is found. Oracle Reports will look for the font SimSun in the list of available fonts generated by the Font lookup algorithm. If this font name is not in that list, Oracle Reports tries to look for the closest matching font from the list of fonts given in the printer definition file.

For the SimSun font, the character set is 850. If it cannot find any matching font for this character set, Oracle Reports searches for a font that has a character set for the environment in which the application is running. After a set of fonts with a similar character set is found, Oracle Reports picks the closest match to the requested font based on the font weight, style, and so on. If more than one font has the same parameters, Oracle Reports picks the first one and uses it instead of the original font.

Font matching rules

When attempting to match a font, Oracle Reports will try to find the closest match according to the following criteria for fonts with the same character set:

fontface > fontsize > fontstyle > fontweight > fontwidth 

If Oracle Reports can't match the font face, it will try to match the font size; if it can't match the size, it will try to match the font style; and so on.

If a font matches the font size but nothing else and another font matches the style, weight, and width but not the font size, then Oracle Reports will pick the font with the same font size.

It should be noted that irrespective of any font in the output file, the final printed output will depend solely on the fonts installed in the printer.

Example: Suppose that a report has layout objects associated with one of two fonts, Helvetica font of size 8, style Plain, and weight Medium, and Courier font. If the user is running this report on a PostScript-1 printer and generating HTML output, the fonts are chosen as follows:

1. While formatting, Oracle Reports checks uifont.ali for any mappings of either specified font. Suppose that uifont.ali contains this entry in the [Printer:PostScript1] section:

   Helvetica.8.Plain.Medium.. = "Mkai-Medium"..  
   
   

   Oracle Reports will now search for the Mkai-Medium font instead of the Helvetica font.

2. Oracle Reports looks for the mapped font in the printer definition (PPD) file. Suppose that the PPD file contains the following entry in the *Font Information section:

   "*Font Mkai-Medium: Standard "(001.004)" Standard ROM" 
   
   

3. Oracle Reports now checks for the associated AFM file (named Mkai-Medium) in the AFM directory. If an AFM file with this name is not found, it will look for another font that has size 8, style Plain, and weight Medium under the same character set as the original font.

Because a report may have to run in many different environments, Oracle Reports always tries to approximate a font for the original font when the original is unavailable. This algorithm is not entirely foolproof. When you create a report, you must be aware of the fonts defined and you should always consider whether those same fonts will be available on the platform where users will run the report. If the font that you have defined is not available in the runtime environment, Oracle Reports substitutes another font that is available on the machine. This process can lead to unexpected and undesirable results, such as strange characters in the report output (for example, Wingding characters) and incorrect formatting of objects.

If you are encountering these kinds of problems, you should use font aliasing to control the font substitutions made by Oracle Reports. Refer to Section 4.4, "Font Aliasing".

Oracle Reports follows the above described mechanisms for all output file generation except PDF, which has the PDF font sub setting/embedding capabilities.

See Also: Chapter 6, "Using PDF in Oracle Reports" for more information on the PDF features and enhancements in OracleAS Reports Services. For more information on PDF in general, consult the Adobe PDF documentation.

For printing, Oracle Reports generates output based upon the printer driver, in case of Windows, or the printer, in the case of UNIX. On Windows, the output generation is handled by the printer driver. The fonts in this case can either be from the system or from the printer. For fonts which are not available on the printer, the printer will get the fonts from the system through Windows APIs.

…..UTF8 = "Arial Unicode MS"…..

4.2 Adding Fonts

In Oracle Reports, fonts can be added for use:

• At build time (in Reports Builder)

• At runtime (in the output)

• In the user interface

4.3 Font Configuration Files

This section describes all of the files associated with font configuration for Oracle Reports:

• uiprint.txt (UNIX only)

• screenprinter.ppd (UNIX only)

• uifont.ali

• PPD and AFM files (UNIX only)

• HPD and TFM files

• Tk2Motif.rgb (UNIX only)

uiprint.txt (UNIX only)

The printer configuration file contains a list of printers installed for the application along with the type of the printer, its version, and the printer definition file. The list of available fonts for runtime is taken from the printer definition file. If no printer is present, Oracle Reports chooses a PostScript printer as the default and default.ppd file as the printer definition file.

Example:

Printer: Printer_driver:Driver_specifying_language_and_level:Printer_
description:Printer_definition_file:

Each line contains five fields separated by colons.

If you are using PCL printing, then this entry should contain the name of an HPD file.

screenprinter.ppd (UNIX only)

screenprinter.ppd is used when a printer is not available on UNIX. screenprinter.ppd is in ORACLE_HOME/guicommon/tk/admin/PPD.

uifont.ali

This file contains mapping information for fonts which can be substituted for other fonts at runtime. Refer to Section 4.4, "Font Aliasing" for more information.

Oracle Reports has added three new sections to the uifont.ali file:

[PDF] - Used for font aliasing and multibyte language support

[PDF:Subset] - Used for TrueType font subsetting and multibyte language support

[PDF:Embed] - Used for Type1 font embedding

Some general rules for the uifont.ali file are:

• Use double quotes around any font or character set names containing two or more words, or spaces.

• Use # in the first column for comments.

• Comment out lines instead of deleting them to be able to use them in the future.

• Font aliasing is a font name-to-font name or character set-to-CID font (from Adobe) only.

• Font subsetting is for TrueType fonts only.

• Font subsetting uses the font name and subsets using the TrueType font file name.

• Font embedding is for Type1 fonts only. These fonts have two files. One for metrics, containing either .afm or .pfm file extension and the binary containing the .pfb file extension.

  Font embedding uses the font name and embeds using the Type 1 font file names (both the AFM and PFB files are required in this order).

Refer to Section 4.4, "Font Aliasing" for more information.

PPD and AFM files (UNIX only)

PostScript Printer Definition (PPD) files and Adobe Font Metrics (AFM) files are supplied by Adobe and by printer vendors. These files contain information about the printer. Along with other parameters, these files are read for the information about the available fonts for the printer, which Oracle Reports will use. For all the fonts listed in the PPD file, Oracle Reports searches for the corresponding AFM file according to the font name and loads all of the fonts for which there is an available AFM.

From the fonts perspective, you should modify these files when you add new fonts for the printer and want these changes reflected in Oracle Reports.

Example:

*% Font Information ===================== 
*DefaultFont: Error 
*Font AvantGarde-Demi: Standard "(001.001)" Standard 
*Font AvantGarde-DemiOblique: Standard "(001.001)" Standard 
*Font Courier: Standard "(001.004)" Standard 
*Font Courier-Bold: Standard "(001.004)" Standard 

The AFM files contain information such as the font attributes (style, weight, width, encoding scheme), whether the font is fixed pitch or proportional, and how large each character is.

After looking for the font names from the PPD files, Oracle Reports searches for the AFM files with the same name as the font according to the search criteria described in Section 4.3.1, "File Searching". For example, if Oracle Reports finds AvantGarde-Demi: Standard in the PPD file, it will search for an AFM file named AvantGarde-Demi in the AFM directory.

Please note that the AFM files are not font files; they are metrics files that provide Oracle Reports with information on how to properly format the character for the printer. If you have an AFM file, but the font is not available on the printer, then Oracle Reports cannot generate the font.

Since the AFM files are NOT fonts themselves, if you wish to have more PostScript printer fonts available, you need to:

1. Purchase the fonts and have them installed on the printer.

2. Obtain revised AFM and PPD files from the font/printer vendor.

3. Obtain matching X Server display fonts (if necessary).

HPD and TFM files

PCL uses HPD and TFM files. The HPD files contain a list of fonts available for the printer and each font refers to a TFM file. The HPD file is an ASCII file, which can be edited, but the TFM file is a binary file, which cannot be edited. Even though TFM files are binary and uneditable, you can perform string operations to read some specific keywords from these files. Oracle Reports recognizes the font name that is in the TFM files and not the one specified in the HPD file. The font vendor should provide TFM files and new fonts should be added to the HPD file for your printer when installed.

Tk2Motif.rgb (UNIX only)

This file contains resource settings for all Oracle Motif tools based on Oracle Toolkit. For font specific resource settings, Tk2Motif*fontMapCs and Tk2Motif*fontList are used.

Tk2Motif*fontMapCs governs the base character set of fonts that the application will use, which are on the X-window display.

If Tk2Motif*fontMapCs: iso8859-2=EE8ISO8859P2, then NLS_LANG should be set to EE8ISO8859P2 and only fonts with encoding as iso8859-2 will be used for the application. If the system does not find any fonts with the above encoding, it will fail with a REP-3000 error.

Tk2Motif*fontList specifies the default system font that will be used by the application. The following means that the Helvetica font with medium weight and normal width of size 12 will be used:

Tk2Motif*fontList: -*-helvetica-medium-r-normal-*-120*

The syntax for the above entries can be found in Tk2Motif.rgb file as comments.

4.4 Font Aliasing

Font aliasing is a mechanism in Oracle Reports that allows a font or its associated attributes like style, weight, width, size and character set to be mapped to another desired font or its associated attributes. Its primary use is when applications are ported from one platform to another and the font associated with some or all of the objects in the layout on the source platform do not exist on the target platform. In such cases font aliasing will be helpful as the nonexistent fonts can be mapped to another available one producing the required results. For example, when moving from Windows to Motif one would use font aliasing to map the Windows Arial to a font available on Motif, such as Helvetica.

This section includes the following topics:

• Specifying Aliasing Information

• Font Aliasing Mechanism

• Font Alias File Sections

• Font Aliasing File Verification

"Original_font"="Font_to_be_aliased"

Face.Size.Style.Weight.Width.CharSet= 
Face.Size.Style.Weight.Width.CharSet

Fontname=filename.ttf
Face.Size.Style.Weight.Width.CharSet=filename.ttf

Arial..Italic+Overstrike = Helvetica.12.Italic.Bold

Arial.8.Italic.Medium.Normal.WE8ISO8859P1 = Helvetica.12.Plain.Light.Normal.WE8ISO8859P1

Arial..... = Helvetica.12.Plain.Light.Normal.WE8ISO8859P1

Arial = "OCR B"

ORACLE_HOME\tools\common (Windows)
ORACLE_HOME/guicommon/tk/admin (UNIX)

fnchk.exe filename

mfontchk filename

Parsing font alias file "/home/oracle/guicommon/tk/admin/uifont.ali"
Ms san serif      

Error at line 85: Invalid font specification
Parse of font alias file failed

4.5 Troubleshooting Font Issues

To help resolve font issues that may occur in your applications, this section provides the following troubleshooting information:

• Checking Whether the Desired Font Is Used in a PostScript File

• Creating Output

• Reading the Output File

• Verifying the Output File

• Correcting Printed Font

• Checking Environment Variables

• Repairing Fonts Not Appearing Correctly in Web Source View

• Understanding Limitations

• Resolving Common Problems

Checking Whether the Desired Font Is Used in a PostScript File

PostScript files have a list of fonts, which is created after reading the PPD file. If you examine the PostScript file, you can check the fonts by looking for the following tags:

• DocumentNeededResource has the list of fonts referenced in the PPD file.

• DocumentSuppliedResource has the list of fonts for which the PostScript driver was able to find the AFM file.

• %%Page paragraph before the field's %IncludeResource:font has the font name which will be used for the field.

For PCL output files, you can check whether a particular font was used or not. Depending on this information the font settings in Oracle Reports or the printer can be modified.

Example:

The test results below are based on a Lexmark Optra printer. The fonts and their numbers as well as the control commands are examples and may vary with other printers.

Font information The Lexmark has a small menu with the option of printing all available fonts (PCL Emulation Fonts). This includes both resident fonts (defaults) and Flash fonts (installed on the printer separately)

In these examples, there are many more fonts and each font has its own code. OCRB for example has code 4206. This number is important later on.

Creating Output

When having problems getting the correct font, simplify the report and thereby the output. This can be done by creating a straightforward report using select sysdate from dual as the query and limiting the number of fonts. This will avoid long runs and create much smaller output files.

Reading the Output File

The resulting PCL-file is a binary file but is reasonably readable in the VI editor. The first small part and the end part is binary, but the middle part is readable and contains data that can be interpreted.

Verifying the Output File

The only interesting information is in the readable, middle part of the file. Find the text (this is the text displayed in the reports output) and check out the part preceding the text.

It looks like this:

....;SD1,14,2,0,3,10.34,5,0,6,0,7,4099;LB here is your text

In the preceding example, the font is selected with code 4099. For the Lexmark printer, this is selecting Courier.

In one example, the font OCR-B (code 4206) was needed. The font did not come out until that specific code was generated just before the selected text. It looks like this:

....;SD1,14,2,0,3,8.57,5,0,6,0,7,4206;LBThis is OCRB font....

Correcting Printed Font

If the output file contains the correct code, but the font does not appear on the printer, the printer probably does not have the font available. This will also occur if the code in the output file (deduced from TFM file) is not the same as the one the printer is expecting. On the Lexmark printer, the font was replaced by the default font on the printer.

If the output file does not contain the code for the font, Oracle Reports did not generate the code to the output file. Check for the HPD and TFM files.

Checking Environment Variables

DEBUG_SLFIND can help you ascertain which of these files was used. With reference to the fonts, you can find the list of AFM/TFM files the application looked at after reading the printer definition file and which font files it read after the aliasing. In this manner, you can also determine whether a font is mapped or not. Usually the order of file reading will be as follows.

• First read the printer definition file.

• Read all the associated font files for the font supplied by this printer definition file.

• Read in the alias file.

• If there is a mapping of file then read in font information files for those fonts and finally again read the AFM file for the fonts that are used in generating the output.

TK_DEBUG_POSTSCRIPT will affect PostScript output. It can be set to any combination of these strings:

• Functions list each toolkit function called in comments in the PostScript output.

• Long produces long, slow, intelligible PostScript.

• Memory displays memory usage at the bottom of each page.

Any of the options can appear in the environment variable, abbreviated down to one letter. You can set it to any combination of these, separated by "/". This variable is case insensitive. For example, Func/L/Mem would give you all three options.

Note that the output that results from using this variable will not be supported by Oracle for customer use. It exists for diagnostics purposes only.

Repairing Fonts Not Appearing Correctly in Web Source View

Text in the user interface of Reports Builder, such as the window title, uses fonts taken from the system resource files for the current language. These system resource files are supplied with the Oracle Reports installation. In Oracle Reports, you can map these fonts in the [rwbuilder] section of uifont.ali. If found, the mapped font is used instead of the original font; if not, Oracle Reports uses the original font.

In the Web Source view of the Report Editor, the following languages may appear garbled: Arabic, Central European languages, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Japanese, Thai, and Turkish. To work around this issue, you can set the font names for Reports Builder in uifont.ali as follows:

[rwbuilder]
.....AR8MSWIN1256="Courier New"
.....CL8MSWIN1251="Courier New"
.....EE8MSWIN1250="Courier New"
.....EL8MSWIN1253="Courier New"
.....IW8MSWIN1255="Courier New"
.....JA16SJIS="MS Gothic"
.....TH8TISASCII="Andale Duospace WT"
.....TR8MSWIN1254="Courier New"

You can download a copy of the Andale Duospace WT (fixed width) font from Oracle Metalink (http://metalink.oracle.com). The ARU number is 2766564.

Understanding Limitations

On Windows:

• For Unicode, Windows provides True Type Big Fonts. These fonts contain the characters necessary to display or print text from more than one language. For example, if you try to type, display, or print Western European, Central European, and Arabic text on a field and see unexpected characters, then you are probably not using a Big Font. Big Fonts for single-byte languages provided by Microsoft Windows are Arial, Courier New, and Times New Roman. For more information, go to Microsoft's Web site: http://www.microsoft.com/typography/fonts/default.aspx.

• Wingdings fonts may not appear when NLS_LANG is set to UTF8.

  The only Wingdings fonts available when using UTF8 are the characters between ASC 32 and 127. ASC 252 would display a blank because it is not supported by UTF8.

  Any of the following font sets would provide a reasonable work around.

  • Webdings - chr(97)

  • Wingdings2 - chr(80)

  • Wingdings2 - chr(87)

On UNIX:

• AFM support is only for single byte PostScript file generation except for the Japanese encoding. The encoding schemes supported for the AFM files are AdobeStandardEncoding, ExtJIS12-88-CFEncoding, FontSpecific, HRoman, ISOLatinHebrew, JIS12-88-CFEncoding, and JIS12e-88-CFEncoding.

  AFM version that is supported is 2.0.

• X11 does not support the underline font attribute. Output to file should work according to steps given below.

• In JDK, a bug causes the bold Korean font to appear incorrectly. OracleAS Reports Services uses the JRE and therefore all bold Korean strings in graphs within reports show up incorrectly.

• PostScript printing will not load the fonts to the printer. So for the desired fonts to appear in the printed output, it is necessary that those fonts should be installed on the printer.

• For PCL output, only TFM font formats are supported.

• The display system on UNIX (for example, X11) is totally independent of any application or printer. There is no direct connection between printing and displaying. There can be a font displayed on your screen that is not printed.

  Display and printer fonts are somewhat similar but have more differences than similarities.

  X fonts (display fonts) are bitmap display glyphs, which are displayed on an X terminal by an X Server.

  Printer fonts are PostScript fonts (mathematical descriptions of fonts, not bitmaps) that are present in a PostScript printer and are generated by a PostScript Interpreter on that printer.

• Font size changes after applying a template.

  Creating a template with font set to Times New Roman size 10 (for all fields) and making the report use this template, makes the Paper Design view of the Report Editor display a different font size.

  The reason for this behavior is that defaulting couldn't fit the layout into the desired area.

  First it reduced the size of text fields and then reduced the size of the fonts. This is much better than wrapping the fields and keeping the template font size.

  Also, for templates, the font chosen may be different to that in the template since it matches first on the character set. So if the template font doesn't support the current character set, the font will change to one that does. This is mostly visible if you have an English template, which you use in a Hebrew/Arabic environment.

Resolving Common Problems

Problem:  Letters are truncated from the right margin on printed label reports.

You have printed a mailing label report on a Windows machine and notice that the last letter, or last few letters, on each line are being truncated. The letters are not missing when you preview the report. You have tried changing the page formatting and font settings, but this has failed to resolve the problem.

Solution: If the report displays correctly using a DESTYPE of Preview, this is not a problem with the printer driver. The problem may be occurring due to the frame properties.

If a frame around the layout objects has a Horizontal Elasticity setting of Fixed and the data exceeds the frame size, it can cause this truncation of data.

Try testing the results after setting the Horizontal Elasticity property to Expand or Variable.

Problem: When generating to file as HTMLCSS, a column is dropped off in the output.

You are generating a report to an HTMLCSS file format and it appears to be fine in the Paper Design view of the Report Editor. When you click the newly created file it comes up in your browser, but the last column is missing from the report output.

If you re-run the report again, it still looks fine in the Paper Design view and the column is there as it should be. Clicking on the file again appears to have the column dropped off and missing from the report output. PDF appears fine in Paper Design view and the Adobe Acrobat reader.

Solution:  

1. Quit Oracle Reports and any other open applications.

2. Choose Windows Control Panel > Display > Settings.

3. Set your fonts to be Small Fonts, click Apply button and then click OK to reconfigure your Windows font settings.

4. Reboot your computer in order for the new font settings to take effect.

5. You can now go back into Windows Control Panel > Display > Settings to verify that you have small fonts as a default for your system.

When you click the HTMLCSS file, your browser shows the report correctly with all of the columns intact.

When viewing HTMLCSS files with your browser, it is recommended to have Small Fonts as the default setting for your Windows system.

If you have Large Fonts as your default, your HTMLCSS file may not display correctly.

Problem: How to choose bitmap fonts sizes of less than 8 point in Reports Builder.

Solution: There are times when a font size of 6 or less is required for reporting purposes. Keeping in mind that font mapping and sizing is actually a product of operating system font files and driver/printer specifications, it is possible to change many fonts to minimal sizes such as 6 or less.

Oracle Reports typically allows fonts to be downsized to a size of 8. This is accomplished by opening a report in Reports Builder, going to the Layout Model view, and selecting the report objects that you wish to change. Once the object is selected, go to the font size list next to the font picker and select your font size.

Typically, your size will be limited to a range from 8 to 72 for True Type fonts, less for other fonts.

You can enter a size smaller or larger than the sizes in the list. To do this, again select the object, place your cursor in the font size field, press Delete to remove the current size number, enter the font size you desire, and then press the TAB key. The change takes effect immediately.

Once again, keep in mind that not all font sizes are possible. Also, some combinations of fonts and attributes are not practical. Simply having the ability to choose a font size does not mean that the font will be legible when printed. Fonts that involve small sizes, combined with bold, italic, or other attributes, may also present legibility problems when printed or displayed due to the limitations of the printer driver, printer, font metrics, language, code sets, NLS_LANG, and, of course, human eyesight.

Problem: The report output font size is different in Windows and UNIX.

A simple report designed on Windows uses the Arial and a font size of 8. This report was ported to Sun Solaris and was found to have a different font size in the output on Solaris. In the UNIX environment, the report is uses the Helvetica font and a font size of 9. The Arial font has been mapped to the equivalent font, Helvetica, on UNIX using uifont.ali.

Solution: 

1. First look for the font size available for Helvetica on the UNIX system by either using the xlsfont command or any other UNIX font utility.

2. You should map variable sized fonts on Windows to variable sized fonts on UNIX. For example, modify the mapping for MS Windows Arial.8 = Helvetica.8 (assuming that size 8 is available for Helvetica on the UNIX system) and ensure that uifont.ali is in the correct directory (see font mapping).

It's probable that the Helvetica font installed on your machine is bit mapped (rasterized) and so it doesn't automatically scale to any arbitrary size. If so, you need to install a scalable Type 1 font, which should allow you to choose any point size.

There may always be differences between fonts on different systems even if the fonts installed are the same because the font configuration files may be different on these systems.

Problem: When printing, fonts are replaced by non True Type fonts. In the Paper Design view, the fonts are fine.

Solution: Check the printer settings (advanced) and ensure that it doesn't say:

True Type Font: Substitute with Device Font

UNIX

Problem: While running Oracle Reports on X-windows emulators, fonts installed on UNIX do not appear in the font lookup box.

Solution: On X-windows emulators, where the font path is usually a font directory on the local machine, the fonts that were installed on will not be available and only the fonts in the local font directory will be used by the Oracle Reports font lookup box. In such cases, you should start a font server on a remote machine where the fonts were installed and point the font path entry to this font server. For starting the font server and setting the font path entry, consult the system manual and X-windows emulator help.

For finding the font path or font server that is currently being used, use the UNIX command xset -.

4.6 Font Types

This section discusses the fonts and character sets relevant to Oracle Reports:

• Character Sets

• Unicode

• Type1 Fonts

• TrueType Fonts

• TrueType Collection

• Barcode Fonts

• CID Fonts