BIRT: pdf emitter, load/use fonts from relative path or from jar files

Question

I use BIRT since early days and still have riddles regarding PDF emitter.

Short story: Can I configure fontsConfig.xml to load fonts from relative path or from jars?

Long story: We are using both FOP and BIRT for generating PDF in our web application. It would be nice to share fonts between libraries. Unfortunately, I can't find a way to do it with BIRT 2.3.1

The root of evil is fontsConfig.xml If I configure it like shown below it works fine:

<font-paths>
<path path="fonts"/>
</font-paths>

But path doesn't allow me using neither relative paths not classpath (or I can't find an appropriate way how to configure it). Neither config1 nor config2 works.

Config1:

<font-paths>
<path path="../fonts"/>
</font-paths>

Config2:

<font-paths>
<path path="classpath:fonts"/>
</font-paths>

Any thoughts will be appreciated.

Answer 1

With some BIRT versions, you can use a SystemProperty "birt.font.dirs". This overrides the fontsConfig.xml.

Well, this once worked, but obviously it was removed from the BIRT source code later.

Now you can call something like

EngineConfig engineConfig = new EngineConfig();
URL fontsConfigurationURL = new URL("file:///path/to/my/fontsConfig.xml");
engineConfig.setFontConfig(fontsConfigurationURL);

Platform.startup(engineConfig);

This allows you to supply BIRT with a customized version of fontsConfig.xml without poking around in the JARs.

Tested with BIRT 4.3.0.

Answer 2

There is a way to have fonts on a relative path to be used in Birt.

What you need to do is copy the fonts to a location in your Web Application. Mine was in : C:\\src\main\webapp\Reports

Now in the application, use the following command to register the fonts from the above mentioned location.

FontFactory.registerDirectory( scContext.getRealPath("/Reports") );

This will register the font.

Tested on Birt 4.3 through Spring MVC