The fourteen faces every reader owns

Set text in one of the fourteen faces a PDF reader already owns, carrying nothing at all inside the file.

Written at the top level of a request, under "standard_fonts"

In plain words

Written for anybody. It says what this puts on a sheet of paper, and asks nothing of you beyond that.

There are fourteen typefaces that every PDF reader has owned from the start: three families, plus two sets of signs. Using them means carrying nothing at all: the document stays tiny and opens everywhere. It is the perfect choice for a delivery note, a receipt, a label — anything that has to be light and come out fast.

For a developer

Written for somebody who writes the calling program: the model, the units, and the settings that carry the weight.

standard_fonts declares, under a name the request chooses, one of the fourteen normalised faces a reader draws whether the file carries them or not. Nothing of the font travels with the request and nothing is written into the document: only the widths and the encoding appear there. A name declared here is looked for in none of the three font sources. A document claiming an archiving standard, on the other hand, wants its fonts written inside it: it goes through fonts or type1_fonts instead.

Every key, with its default

The reference: which keys are required, which are optional, what each one defaults to and which combinations the server declines.

  • standard_fonts — array, optional, empty by default.
  • standard_fonts[].name — string, required. The name items set text in this face by.
  • standard_fonts[].face — string, required. Fourteen values: courier, courier_bold, courier_bold_oblique, courier_oblique, helvetica, helvetica_bold, helvetica_bold_oblique, helvetica_oblique, times_roman, times_bold, times_bold_italic, times_italic, symbol, zapf_dingbats.

symbol and zapf_dingbats are reached through an encoding of their own. A face declared here may be a link in a font_chains chain. A typographic variant (font_variants) is built on an embedded font, a client font or a library font. A document declaring archive wants a face written into the file.

A whole request that draws it

Post this as it stands and a PDF comes back. Nothing has been left out of it.

{
  "standard_fonts": [
    { "name": "sans", "face": "helvetica" },
    { "name": "serif_bold", "face": "times_bold" }
  ],
  "items": [
    {
      "type": "text",
      "rect": { "llx": 60, "lly": 750, "urx": 535, "ury": 775 },
      "content": ["Delivery note 2026-014"],
      "font": "serif_bold",
      "font_size": 16
    },
    {
      "type": "text",
      "rect": { "llx": 60, "lly": 720, "urx": 535, "ury": 738 },
      "content": ["Nothing of the lettering travels with this file."],
      "font": "sans",
      "font_size": 11
    }
  ]
}

The line that sends it, in three languages

The lettering

Carrying a font inside the document The older Type 1 font programs The typographic niceties of a face A face whose letters you draw yourself A backup face for the rarer signs

Where to go next

Every key of a request, in one page The other thirty-two settings of a request

See the prices See the examples

Glossary

PDF library
A piece of software your own programs use to write PDF documents. It has no window and no buttons: your program tells it what to draw, and it hands the finished file back. This site also calls it the engine, which is the same thing under another name. The server is a second program that holds the engine and answers whoever asks it for a document over the network, and the rendering service is that server running on our machines rather than on yours.
standard
A rule argued out in committee, published under a number anybody may buy and read, and identical for every firm claiming it. A claim to follow one can therefore be checked against the text. A way of working that merely spread because it worked is a habit of the trade: useful, widespread, and answerable to no text at all.
font
The drawing of every letter, digit and mark a document writes, held in a file of its own. A PDF carries the fonts it is set in inside itself, which is why it opens looking the same on a machine that has never had them. Leave them out and a reader puts another font in their place, and the layout moves.
request
One call to the service: you send what the document should say, and get the document back. Your bill counts these calls, one for each document. The number of pages inside a document is never counted.

Every word the site explains