Font Aliasing Mechanism Font Aliasing

Managing Fonts in Oracle Reports 9-15 Error at line 85: Invalid font specification Parse of font alias file failed The above error indicates that there is a syntax error in uifont.ali in the mapping rule for MS San Serif font on line 85.

9.5 Font Types

This section discusses the fonts and character sets relevant to Oracle Reports: ■ Character Sets ■ Unicode ■ Type1 Fonts ■ TrueType Fonts ■ TrueType Collection ■ Barcode Fonts ■ CID Fonts

9.5.1 Character Sets

The character set component of the NLS environment variables specifies the character set in which data is represented in your environment. When data is transferred from a system using one character set to a system using another character set, it is processed and displayed correctly on the second system, even though some characters might be represented by different binary values in the character sets. If you are designing a multilingual application, or even a single-language application that runs with multiple character sets, you must determine the character set most widely used at runtime and then generate with the NLS environment variable NLS_ LANG set to that particular character set. If you design and generate an application in one character set and run it in another character set, performance can suffer. Furthermore, if the runtime character set does not contain all the characters in the generate character set, then question marks appear in place of the unrecognized characters. Portable Document Format PDF supports multibyte character sets. There might be situations where you create an application with a specific font but find that a different font is being used when you run that application. You would most likely encounter this when using an English font such as MS Sans Serif or Arial in environments other than Western European. This occurs because Oracle Reports checks to see if the character set associated with the font matches the character set specified by the language environment variable NLS_ LANG . If the two do not match, Oracle Reports automatically substitutes the font with another font whose associated character set matches the character set specified by the language environment variable. This automatic substitution assures that the data being returned from the database gets displayed correctly in the application. Note: If you enter local characters using an English font, then Windows does an implicit association with another font. There might be cases, however, where you do not want this substitution to take place. You can avoid this substitution by mapping all desired fonts to the WE8ISO8859P1 character set in the font alias file uifont.ali.