dskripchenko/php-pdf-fonts-liberation

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: full Latin (Western and Eastern European), Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and Devanagari basics.

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\PhpPdfFontsLiberation\LiberationFontProvider;

$bytes = DocumentBuilder::new()
    ->heading(1, 'Annual Report')
    ->paragraph('Тысяча красивых символов с правильным кернингом.')
    ->toBytes(new Engine(fontProvider: new LiberationFontProvider));

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 so Liberation acts as a fallback for missing glyphs:

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,                            // fallback
]);

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