Using Font Kerning and Tracking in PDF

How to Use Font Kerning and Tracking in a PDF

The following steps and sample code illustrate using font kerning and tracking in a PDF document using DynamicPDF Core Suite.

Steps for Using Fonts in a PDF Document

1. Create a Document object.
2. Create a Page object.
3. Create a TextArea object and add the text to be displayed.
4. Enable Kerning for the text area by setting the KerningEnabled property to true .
5. Loop over the entire TextArea instance's KernValues spacing array and assign a value for every pair (or pair subset). Assign a positive value to reduce the space between characters or assign a negative value to increase the space between characters.
6. Create the PDF document using the Draw method.

Sample Code - C#

Document document = new Document();
Page page = new Page();
string text = "To and WA are examples of when kerning would be used.";
TextArea textArea = new TextArea(text, 10, 10, 400, 700, Font.TimesRoman);

textArea.KerningEnabled = true;
KerningValues kernValues = textArea.GetKerningValues();

for (int i = 0; i < kernValues.Spacing.Length; i++)
{
        kernValues.Spacing[i] = (short)(kernValues.Spacing[i] - 400);
}

page.Elements.Add(textArea);
document.Pages.Add(page);  

document.Draw(@"Output.pdf");        

GitHub Project

Clone or view the example project at GitHub. This example code is contained in the Examples/FontKerning.cs file.

Getting Started

NuGet Package

DynamicPDF Core Suite is available on NuGet and is part of the ceTe.DynamicPDF.CoreSuite.NET package. The easiest way to install the package is through the Visual Studio Package Manger. You can also download the package directly from NuGet.

DynamicPDF Core Suite Information

DynamicPDF Core Suite contains over 75 page elements you can use to add rich content to the PDFs you create. DynamicPDF Core Suite includes elements for the following:

• Images,
• Text Objects (TextArea and Label),
• HTML,
• Barcodes (47 types),
• Form Fields,
• and Charts.

More information can be found on the DynamicPDF Core Suite website.

• DynamicPDF Core Suite for .NET

Available on Other Platforms

DynamicPDF Core Suite is also available for the Java and COM/ActiveX platforms. Refer to the respective product pages for more details.

• Java - DynamicPDF Generator for Java
• COM/ActiveX - DynamicPDF Generator for COM/ActiveX