README

Liberation font family bundle for dskripchenko/php-pdf — ships 12 TTFs (Sans / Serif / Mono × Regular / Bold / Italic / Bold Italic) and a ready-to-use FontProvider implementation.

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Why a separate package

dskripchenko/php-pdf is MIT-licensed. The Liberation fonts ship under the SIL Open Font License (OFL) 1.1, which is permissive and GPL-compatible but distinct from MIT (different naming rules for derivatives, different redistribution clauses). Keeping fonts in a separate package:

isolates the OFL license zone from the MIT zone;
lets callers opt out of the ~4 MB font bundle when they ship their own fonts;
enables future sibling packages (php-pdf-fonts-noto, php-pdf-fonts-roboto, etc.) without changing the core.

What's bundled

Liberation Fonts 2.1.5 (latest stable), 12 files in assets/fonts/:

Family	Variants
LiberationSans	Regular, Bold, Italic, BoldItalic
LiberationSerif	Regular, Bold, Italic, BoldItalic
LiberationMono	Regular, Bold, Italic, BoldItalic

The Liberation family is metric-compatible with Microsoft's proprietary fonts — text laid out for Arial / Times New Roman / Courier New will render with the same line wrapping using the Liberation equivalent, so DOCX-input → PDF and HTML-templates → PDF workflows produce identical pagination.

Glyph coverage: Latin (Western and Eastern European, Turkish, Vietnamese), Cyrillic, Greek and Hebrew. There is no Arabic, Indic or CJK: for those, add a font that has them (Noto, for one) with a DirectoryFontProvider.

Installation

composer require dskripchenko/php-pdf-fonts-liberation

PHP 8.2+. No native extensions required.

Usage

use Dskripchenko\PhpPdf\Build\DocumentBuilder;
use Dskripchenko\PhpPdf\Layout\Engine;
use Dskripchenko\PhpPdf\Pdf\PdfFont;
use Dskripchenko\PhpPdfFontsLiberation\LiberationFontProvider;

$fonts = new LiberationFontProvider;

$bytes = DocumentBuilder::new()
    ->heading(1, 'Annual Report')
    ->paragraph('Тысяча красивых символов с правильным кернингом.')
    ->toBytes(new Engine(
        defaultFont: new PdfFont($fonts->resolve('LiberationSans')),
        boldFont: new PdfFont($fonts->resolve('LiberationSans-Bold')),
        italicFont: new PdfFont($fonts->resolve('LiberationSans-Italic')),
        boldItalicFont: new PdfFont($fonts->resolve('LiberationSans-BoldItalic')),
        fontProvider: $fonts,   // for runs that name a family: Arial, Times New Roman…
    ));

defaultFont and its bold / italic faces set the text with no family of its own; without them the engine falls back to the base-14 Helvetica, which has no Cyrillic. fontProvider answers for runs that name a family — font-family: "Times New Roman" in HTML, fontFamily in a RunStyle.

Microsoft name aliasing

LiberationFontProvider resolves common proprietary names to their metric-compatible Liberation equivalent automatically:

Requested name	Resolved to
`Arial`	`LiberationSans`
`Arial-Bold`	`LiberationSans-Bold`
`Times New Roman`	`LiberationSerif`
`Times New Roman-Italic`	`LiberationSerif-Italic`
`Courier New`	`LiberationMono`

A template that says font-family: "Times New Roman" works out of the box.

Combining with system or custom fonts

Use Dskripchenko\PhpPdf\Font\ChainedFontProvider to stack providers. Each font name is looked up in order and the first provider that has it wins, so your own families come first and Liberation answers for the rest — Arial, Times New Roman and the like:

use Dskripchenko\PhpPdf\Font\ChainedFontProvider;
use Dskripchenko\PhpPdf\Font\DirectoryFontProvider;
use Dskripchenko\PhpPdfFontsLiberation\LiberationFontProvider;

$fonts = new ChainedFontProvider(
    new DirectoryFontProvider(__DIR__.'/my-brand-fonts'),  // checked first
    new LiberationFontProvider,                            // then Liberation
);

Filling existing forms

Since php-pdf 1.10, ExistingFormFiller picks this package up on its own: when a value cannot be shown with the form's own fonts (Cyrillic, Greek, …), it is drawn with the matching Liberation face — Sans, Serif or Mono, regular or bold, following the field's font. No configuration is needed; installing the package is enough.

ExistingFormFiller::fromFile('template.pdf')
    ->setValue('full_name', 'Иван Петров')   // drawn with Liberation Sans
    ->toFile('filled.pdf');

The php-pdf family

Package	What it adds
php-pdf	The core: HTML with CSS or a builder to PDF, read, merge, fill forms, sign and validate.
laravel-php-pdf	Laravel bridge: a Blade view straight to PDF, `response()->pdf()`, signing from config.
php-pdf-fonts-liberation (this package)	Liberation Sans, Serif and Mono, metric-compatible with Arial, Times New Roman and Courier New (OFL, kept out of the MIT core).
php-pdf-cryptopro	Signs with a key in CryptoPro CSP on the server: GOST R 34.10-2012, Russian qualified signatures.
php-pdf-pkcs11	Signs with a key on an HSM, a smart card or a USB token, through PKCS#11.
php-pdf-cloud-kms	Signs with a key in AWS KMS, Google Cloud KMS or Azure Key Vault.

License

This package mixes two licenses:

Zone	License
`src/` (PHP wrapper)	MIT — see LICENSE
`assets/fonts/` TTFs	SIL OFL 1.1 — see OFL.txt

Both are permissive, GPL-compatible, and allow commercial use.

Attribution

Liberation Fonts © Red Hat, Inc., Pavel Hlaváč, and others. Upstream: https://github.com/liberationfonts/liberation-fonts

dskripchenko / php-pdf-fonts-liberation

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