Bob, what were your six biggest challenges in developing pdf?
Dave, that’s easy. Fonts, fonts, fonts, fonts, fonts and fonts. In that order.
The most noticeable limitation of Text Collector is that when it converts your text messages to pdf, it drops emoticons. Instead of smiley faces, it displays diamond-question mark things, “replacement characters.”
As ever, fonts are the problem.
When you need to display something laid out just so, such that it prints on a page and everything fits correctly, text alone isn’t enough.
Text, nowadays, usually means some encoding of Unicode. Technically, it’s a “Unicode transformation format,” which is where we get the “utf” in utf-8. Impress your friends and family with that.
Unicode represents abstract concepts, like the idea of the letter A or a smile. Emoji, just like letters A through Z are Unicode text, but precisely how letter A or winky face actually gets written to the page depends on your font.
If you want to ensure that your text fits on the page, doesn’t run over or under the things around it, or, indeed displays at all, you must also include a font. In pdf terms, this is called “font embedding,” and it is what Android’s built-in pdf library does.
So far so good: just embed the emoji font and smiles or piles of poo come along for free, right? Wrong.
Most fonts specify letter outlines and leave color of the letters up to the user. Thus, I can say that I want letter A in blue or orange and both are the same font:
Not so, Google’s emoji font. It includes cats, dragons and piles of poo in glorious, and heavyweight, color. Including this font makes for a massive pdf: almost 10 megabytes, on Android 6. It only takes two or three such documents to blow past Gmail’s attachment size limit. Typical collections would run into hundreds of megabytes, or gigabytes. They could easily consume all available space on the device.
This isn’t a new problem, and there’s a well-known solution: font subsetting. That is, only include glyphs for the small handful of characters that you actually use. Android’s built-in pdf library can’t do that.
So, to get emoji, I have to bring in an entirely new pdf library… and I’ve been working on this long enough. Version 1 needs to ship. Emoji will have to wait till version 2.
Should Be Simple 