Custom Fonts in Visualforce Page (renderas="pdf")

The current v31.0 "official" line is that there is a limited set of fonts available.

Fonts Available When Using Visualforce PDF Rendering

Visualforce PDF rendering supports a limited set of fonts. Use the following font names to ensure that PDF output renders as you expect.
The fonts available when you’re rendering a page as a PDF are as follows. The first listed font-family value for each typeface is the recommended choice.

  • Typeface
  • Style font-family Value to Use (Font Synonyms)
  • Arial Unicode MS
  • Arial Unicode MS
  • Helvetica
  • sans-serif
  • SansSerif
  • Dialog
  • Times
  • serif
  • Times
  • Courier
  • monospace
  • Courier
  • Monospaced
  • DialogInput

Note

  • These rules apply to server-side PDF rendering. You might see different results when viewing pages in a web browser.
  • Text styled with any value besides those listed above receives the default font style, Times. This means that, ironically, while Helvetica’s synonyms render as Helvetica, using “Helvetica” for the font-family style renders as Times. We recommend using “sans-serif”.
  • Arial Unicode MS is the only multibyte font available, providing support for the extended character sets of languages that don’t use the Latin character set.

Source - Fonts Available When Using Visualforce PDF Rendering

Note also that there is talk of a new and improved PDF rendering engine in the works. This may give you better font options, but is only in closed pilot last time I checked.


Assuming the PDF generation in Salesforce is based on Flying Saucer, the Flying Saucer FAQ includes an example of how to embed a custom font:

@font-face {
        font-family: "UbuntuMono";
        src: url("UbuntuMono-R.ttf");
        -fs-pdf-font-embed: embed;
        -fs-pdf-font-encoding: Identity-H; 
}

* {
        font-family: "UbuntuMono";
}

which suggests it is possible. You would need to use a public URL for the font or a static resource URL.

But I have not tried it.

PS

Just spent 30 minutes trying to get this to work for a Google font and while it works well for the HTML output I could not get it to work for PDF output. So either by design or accident it looks like this does not work in Salesforce.

Tags:

Pdf

Visualforce

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