The older Type 1 font programs

Carry a Type 1 font into the document, the format of the older typesetting studios, under a name of your choosing.

Written at the top level of a request, under "type1_fonts"

In plain words

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

Computer typefaces have had several formats over the years, the way photographs have had several formats. A studio that has been working for a long while owns typefaces in an older format, bought at the time, and has no wish to buy everything again. Those typefaces work here too: they are sent with the document, they travel inside it, and the result shows anywhere.

For a developer

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

type1_fonts carries the Type 1 programs the request transports, base64-encoded, each under the name items set text in it by. Both shapes are read: the raw program and the segmented form a .pfb file holds. The program is carried into the document whole, as it was supplied.

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.

  • type1_fonts — array, optional, empty by default.
  • type1_fonts[].name — string, required. The name items set text in this font by.
  • type1_fonts[].data — string, required. The bytes of the program, base64-encoded.

The program goes into the document whole; narrowing it down to the characters actually used is planned for a future version. A name declared here is not looked for in the three font sources: the request supplies it itself. It may stand as a link in a font_chains chain.

A whole request that draws it

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

One name below stands for a font file: put the encoded file in its place, or send the file itself beside the description, as a part of the same call.

{
  "type1_fonts": [
    { "name": "stroke", "data": "PASTE_THE_TYPE1_PROGRAM_BASE64_HERE" }
  ],
  "items": [
    {
      "type": "text",
      "rect": { "llx": 60, "lly": 740, "urx": 535, "ury": 770 },
      "content": ["Set in a Type 1 program"],
      "font": "stroke",
      "font_size": 18
    }
  ]
}

The line that sends it, in three languages

The lettering

Carrying a font inside the document The fourteen faces every reader owns 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

byte
The unit a file's weight is counted in, the way a parcel is counted in grams. A thousand of them make a kilobyte, and a million make a megabyte — the size of one photograph taken with a telephone. A one-page PDF here weighs between six thousand and a hundred and twenty thousand, so a hundred of them fit in the space of five photographs.
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.
Type 1 font
The older shape a typeface file comes in, still used where a particular cut of a typeface only ever existed that way. A document carries the file as it was supplied.

Every word the site explains