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Fonts

Tharga.Reporter renders text through PDFsharp, which does not read fonts from the operating system by itself. Tharga.Reporter installs a font resolver for you the first time a Renderer is constructed, so in the common case there is nothing to configure.

How a font family is resolved

A font named on a Text, TextBox or Table element is looked up in this order:

  1. Fonts you registered with ReporterFontResolver.Register.
  2. Fonts installed on the host — the resolver scans the usual font directories on Windows, Linux and macOS and matches on family name plus bold/italic.
  3. An embedded fallback face, so a host with no fonts installed still renders text rather than throwing.

Why the same template can look different on Linux

The fallback is what makes a bare container work, but it is not the font you asked for. A template that names Verdana gets real Verdana on a Windows host and the fallback face on a Linux host that has no Verdana installed. The text still renders and the layout still flows, but glyph widths differ, so line breaks and centring can land differently.

This matters most when the output is printed or scanned — a membership card, a label, a form that has to line up with pre-printed stationery.

There are two ways to get identical output everywhere.

Install the font on the host. On a Debian-based image:

RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends fonts-liberation \
    && rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/*

Or ship the font with your application and register it at startup, which does not depend on the host at all:

using Tharga.Reporter.Fonts;

ReporterFontResolver.Register("Verdana", false, false, File.ReadAllBytes("fonts/verdana.ttf"));
ReporterFontResolver.Register("Verdana", true, false, File.ReadAllBytes("fonts/verdanab.ttf"));

Register the exact faces your templates use. A family registered as regular-only is still used for bold and italic text, with the bold or italic appearance simulated.

Check the licence of any font you embed. Redistributing a font inside an application is not always permitted, and the fonts shipped with Windows generally are not.

Supplying your own resolver

If your application already has a font strategy, assign it before rendering and Tharga.Reporter will leave it alone:

PdfSharp.Fonts.GlobalFontSettings.FontResolver = new MyFontResolver();

GlobalFontSettings.FontResolver is global and is only set once, so assign it during startup rather than per request.

Barcodes do not use fonts

The BarCode element draws its bars as vector rectangles and renders no text, so it is unaffected by font resolution and looks identical on every platform.

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