Microsoft Word Embedded Font

Jobbes · External Since: Feb 23, 2007 Posts: 3

I've tried searching for a similar answer from this NG, but I couldn't
find one.

I am currently doing a project for school. Basically I'm trying to
rasterize to ascii glyphs taken from a truetype font file. I've been
doing some tests using Word documents and everything was going well
until I tried printing a word document sent by my friend to me having
embedded fonts.

I don't have the font in my machine, so I wouldn't know where to get
the font metrics when printing a microsoft word document. I also
encountered this for Adobe acrobat, but I was able to get the
information from the %windir%/TMP folder.

Any information on where Microsoft Word places a temporary font file,
if ever it does, is highly appreciated. Thank You.

Jobbes · External Since: Feb 23, 2007 Posts: 3

Hi Character,

> Do you mean the metrics or the outlines themselves?

Particularly the TTF font tables (i.e. name, glyf, etc. ).

> It doesn't. Embedded fonts in MS Office products are encrypted and
> cannot be extracted. They're not even activated except for the
> document that contains them. Incidentally; in Word 97 and earlier, if
> the embedding flag was "installable" and the font wasn't already
> installed, Word would install it right then and there! That loophole
> has been tightly closed in more recent versions.

If this is the case, then the only way to extract the font tables is
by using the WinApi GetFontData?

> Adobe Acrobat Reader hasn't put embedded fonts into the temp directory
> since Version 3.1 (and it's now up to Version Cool

. And even then, for
> Type 1 fonts, only the font outlines (equivalent to the .pfb file)
> were there. Font metrics (the .pfm file) aren't even embedded in pdf
> documents in the first place. I'm not sure whether the font metrics
> are included in embedded Truetypes.

Hmmm. I've tried printing a PDF file and I saw a file Z.RemoveThis@R49.tmp
created in the TMP folder. I tried using the MS utility TTFDump on it
and I was able to extract the different font tables. I'm using Acrobat
Reader 7.0, btw.

> I'm not sure what you mean by "rasterize to ASCII". As a phrase, it
> doesn't make much sense.

Oh..sorry If I wasn't making any sense. All I wanted to say that I
wanted to display in ASCII a glyph outline.

ex.
Letter A

*
* *
* * * * *
* *
* *

Character · External Since: Sep 26, 2006 Posts: 35

Jobbes wrote:
> I've tried searching for a similar answer from this NG, but I couldn't
> find one.
>
> I am currently doing a project for school. Basically I'm trying to
> rasterize to ascii glyphs taken from a truetype font file. I've been
> doing some tests using Word documents and everything was going well
> until I tried printing a word document sent by my friend to me having
> embedded fonts.
>
> I don't have the font in my machine, so I wouldn't know where to get
> the font metrics when printing a microsoft word document. I also
> encountered this for Adobe acrobat, but I was able to get the
> information from the %windir%/TMP folder.

Do you mean the metrics or the outlines themselves?

> Any information on where Microsoft Word places a temporary font file,
> if ever it does, is highly appreciated. Thank You.

It doesn't. Embedded fonts in MS Office products are encrypted and
cannot be extracted. They're not even activated except for the
document that contains them. Incidentally; in Word 97 and earlier, if
the embedding flag was "installable" and the font wasn't already
installed, Word would install it right then and there! That loophole
has been tightly closed in more recent versions.

Adobe Acrobat Reader hasn't put embedded fonts into the temp directory
since Version 3.1 (and it's now up to Version Cool

. And even then, for
Type 1 fonts, only the font outlines (equivalent to the .pfb file)
were there. Font metrics (the .pfm file) aren't even embedded in pdf
documents in the first place. I'm not sure whether the font metrics
are included in embedded Truetypes.

I'm not sure what you mean by "rasterize to ASCII". As a phrase, it
doesn't make much sense.

- Character

Jobbes · External Since: Feb 23, 2007 Posts: 3

> You've now gotten way beyond me! But where would you get the FontData
> from if you can't grab the font file itself? My guess is that the font
> is somewhere in ram, but never committed to a hard drive except

Hahahaha...my bad. I have a tendency to mix words. But I don't know,
most programmers I know would normally treat the word ASCII as single
byte plain text characters, Unicode obviously a two-byte character
hehehe....I know that it's a misnomer but as long as we understand
each other, I guess it's ok.

Thanks for your help Character...I'll see what I can find from the
bookstore tom.

Character · External Since: Sep 26, 2006 Posts: 35

Jobbes wrote:

> Hi Character,
>
>
>>Do you mean the metrics or the outlines themselves?
>
>
> Particularly the TTF font tables (i.e. name, glyf, etc. ).

OK. That's not the FontMetrics, which has a very specific definition,
although some of the tables include font metric data.

>>It doesn't. Embedded fonts in MS Office products are encrypted and
>>cannot be extracted. They're not even activated except for the
>>document that contains them. Incidentally; in Word 97 and earlier, if
>>the embedding flag was "installable" and the font wasn't already
>>installed, Word would install it right then and there! That loophole
>>has been tightly closed in more recent versions.
>
>
> If this is the case, then the only way to extract the font tables is
> by using the WinApi GetFontData?

You've now gotten way beyond me! But where would you get the FontData
from if you can't grab the font file itself? My guess is that the font
is somewhere in ram, but never committed to a hard drive except
possibly in the page file, where nothing is accessible anyway.

>>Adobe Acrobat Reader hasn't put embedded fonts into the temp directory
>>since Version 3.1 (and it's now up to Version Cool

. And even then, for
>>Type 1 fonts, only the font outlines (equivalent to the .pfb file)
>>were there. Font metrics (the .pfm file) aren't even embedded in pdf
>>documents in the first place. I'm not sure whether the font metrics
>>are included in embedded Truetypes.
>
>
> Hmmm. I've tried printing a PDF file and I saw a file Z RemoveThis @R49.tmp
> created in the TMP folder. I tried using the MS utility TTFDump on it
> and I was able to extract the different font tables. I'm using Acrobat
> Reader 7.0, btw.

That's intriguing! Will have to play with that. I just tried, but it
must have disappeared too quickly

>>I'm not sure what you mean by "rasterize to ASCII". As a phrase, it
>>doesn't make much sense.
>
>
> Oh..sorry If I wasn't making any sense. All I wanted to say that I
> wanted to display in ASCII a glyph outline.

Ahh... I see what you mean. That's a (common) mis-use of the word
ASCII, which is the American Standard Code for Information Interchange
.... it's not a synonym for plain text.

>
> ex.
> Letter A
>
> *
> * *
> * * * * *
> * *
> * *
>

---- Character