How do I configure XpdfViewer and XpdfPrint to use external fonts?

PDF files are supposed to embed all of the fonts they use, other than the "Base-14" fonts (Times, Helvetica/Arial, Courier - regular, bold, italic, bold-italic - and Symbol). If a font isn't on the Base-14 list, it should be embedded in the PDF file.

But you will sometimes encounter a PDF file that uses non-Base-14 fonts and doesn't embed them. In this situation, XpdfViewer and XpdfPrint will, by default, substitute one of the Base-14 fonts (attempting to choose the best match).

Another alternative is to configure XpdfViewer or XpdfPrint to use a specific external TrueType font file. The first step is to create an xpdfrc configuration file. Then, for each external font, add a line to the xpdfrc file, like this:

The first parameter ("Wingdings" in the example) is the name of the font, as used in the PDF file. The second parameter ("c:\windows\fonts\wingding.ttf") is the complete path to the TrueType font file. (Make sure you use quotes if the file name contains spaces.)

If you don't know the name of the font(s) used by the PDF file, you can use a command line utility called "pdffonts" to get a list of all fonts used in the PDF file. pdffonts is part of the open source Xpdf package, which you can download here (look for the Win32 binaries).

You can list any number of fonts in the xpdfrc file. Just add another line for each font mapping.