Use TextWriter with specified font

[hgdhot]

Hi,

I get the fonts, flags in span through the page.get_text("dict") method,

(1)Can I use textwriter to write some new content with specified font like 'CMMI7'? How can I get the "CMMI7 Font object"?
(2)Is there any way to write some new text with bold and italic characters ?

[JorjMcKie]

Answering directly here - then I will transfer this to "Discussions", where we may handle any additional questions.
This is not issue / bug.

Ad (1)

The displayed fontname as you are showing it probably is incomplete, because most creator software will build font subsets - resulting in an extended name like "ABCDEF+CMMI7". The first 6 characters are random, so you must extract the text after setting a global parameter which causes returning the full subset name in text extraction. Once you know this name, inspect this output to find the font xref:

In [4]: page.get_fonts()
Out[4]:
[(12, 'cff', 'Type1', 'EAMKOQ+FrutigerLT-Roman', 'T1_0', 'WinAnsiEncoding'),
 (14, 'cff', 'Type1', 'DWXEAS+FrutigerLT-Bold', 'T1_1', 'WinAnsiEncoding'),
 (15,
  'cff',
  'Type1',
  'CXIYMU+AGaramondPro-Regular',
  'T1_2',
  'WinAnsiEncoding')]
In [5]: # access font buffer of xref 12 and make a font of it
In [6]: ff = doc.extract_font(12)
In [7]: fontbuffer = ff[-1]
In [8]: myfont = fitz.Font(fontbuffer=fontbuffer)
In [9]: myfont
Out[9]: Font('FrutigerLT-Roman Regular')
In [10]: myfont.flags
Out[10]:
{'mono': False,
 'serif': True,
 'bold': False,
 'italic': False,
 'substitute': False,
 'stretch': False,
 'fake-bold': False,
 'fake-italic': False,
 'opentype': False,
 'invalid-bbox': False,
 'cjk': False,
 'cjk-lang': None,
 'embed': True,
 'never-embed': False}

Setting the global variable for returning the full subset font name: fitz.TOOLS.set_subset_fontnames(True).

Then you can use myfont just as is in TextWriter output. If using insert_text()/insert_textb() you must first install the font on the page page.insert_font(...,fontname="myname", fontbuffer=myfont.buffer). Then use page.insert_text(..., fontname="myname").

BUT beware that these are subset fonts: not all characters of the full fonts will be present - that's the whole motivation behind subsets, isn't it. So if your output text contains unsupported characters you will see spaces there.
It may be better to get hold of the full font - which often is possible for popular fonts.

Ad (2)

Font weights (bold) and styles (italic) generally are part of different fontfiles. If you text contains a mixture of regular and these other variations, you must undertake the effort to make different text pieces yourself - each with its own font (variant). This is tedious with insert_text and a little easier with TextWriter.

But there is an elegant solution available now in PyMuPDF: use the new Story class!
This allows you to use HTML source to express desired font variants using syntax like "Good morning, if it is a good morning, which I doubt.". If you then use HTML styling (e.g. via CSS), The story will automatically switch between the different fonts to output the regular, bold and italic text parts.
Please read the respective documentation to see if this is an option for you.