Hi,
since BreezingForms 1.8.5 build 860 there is better support for custom TTF files as well as unicode support.
There is no need any longer for hacking BreezingForms to include custom font files, but now you can add your own custom font files files by simple file uploading.
By default, BreezingForms now uses the Verdana font family based on TrueType and most important european and american character sets are covered. So if you don't need Chinese or a different font family than Verdana, then just use BreezingForms as it is and you are fine. If you want to change anything, then please follow the steps below:
1. Find and download a TTF font file that fits your need on the web (either the look of the font and/or the supported character sets).
Alternatively, you may
download this font file
from our server and use it instead.
The unifont file is from the
Unifoundry project
and tries to cover all important character sets in the world. Because of the size of that font file, we unfortunately can't add it to the BreezingForms installable package but as you'll see below, it's not a huge problem to add it later on.
In the instructions, we will use this unifont as example but it will work with any other TTF file you are using in the same way.
2. Make sure to give your font file a simple name, without special or uppercase characters. For example "unifont.ttf".
3. Open your FTP program and upload the font file into the "/media/breezingforms/pdftpl/fonts/" folder.
4. Create an empty file in the same directory and give it the name "unifont_active". Without file extension (important). This empty file is supposed to signal which font is currently active. It just needs to sit there, so BreezingForms knows which font file to pick. If your TTF font file would be for example "times.ttf", then the file would be called "times_active".
5. Make sure that the folder "/administrator/components/com_breezingforms/libraries/tcpdf/fonts/" is writable by your server. This is very important as the underlying TCPDF library needs to create necessary files out of the TTF and store it into that location. If that folder is not writable, it might lead to errors and empty PDF exports.
6. Now try to create your PDF exports and you should see the fonts and characters matching your uploaded TrueType font.
NOTE: with the free font "unifont.ttf" we noticed a glitch on MacOS / Chrome and displaying the PDF inline in Chrome (blank rows). Opening the exported PDF in the system viewer however, works.
