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Support for font variations #1632
Description
Feature Request
It seems FontKit has support for variation of fonts that support it via Font::getVariation({ ...features }) -> Font, but PDFKit does not expose this feature.
I've grepped through the source and could not find a way to do this already, I apologise if it's already possible some way and I'm missing something important. Please let me know.
Feature description
I imagine the ideal place is PDFFont::font taking variations as a parameter; or for future-proofing, an options object, which would currently only have variations.
doc.font("InterVariable.ttf", { variations: { wght: 900 } });
Activity
MKRhere commentedon Jul 6, 2025
fwiw I attempted this myself by adding the new option to
lib/mixins/fonts.jsand passed it toPDFFontFactory.openinlib/font_factory.js. Directly doingfont = font.getVariation(options)inPDFFontFactory.openbreaks everything with the error:First argument to DataView constructor must be an ArrayBuffer(atfontFile.end(this.subset.encode());, but goes further into FontKit).Then I tried simply storing it in
font._variationsand accessed it inEmbeddedFontconstructor and calledgetVariationthere, and the error disappeared, but I could not get the variation to be applied in the output. If I moved it to theembed()method, I run into the same error as above.I'm new to PDFKit, so if someone has ideas but not the time to add this feature, it would be nice if you could suggest where I should attempt further changes; I'd love to try.