In the documentation there is a section "Fonts and Printers" in the "Design How-To" page that deals with this topic. Find the text pasted below.
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Alex Geller
Fonts and Printers
Getting Font and Printer Information from your Server
Some scripts are provided in the <GRE-install-dir>/bin directory to get information about the available fonts and printers. These scripts are executed from the command-line:
* fontinfo - lists the fonts available on your server
* fontinfopdf - lists only the fonts that can be used in pdfs
* printerinfo - lists the available printers
Tips on Installing common Fonts or new Fonts
The best results are achieved if the fonts on the server where Genero Report Engine (GRE) is installed, and those used in the Genero Report Designer, are the same:
* If GRE and the Designer are installed on the same machine, there is no problem.
* If GRE and the Designer are installed on different machines that have the same operating system and the same installed fonts, there is no problem.
A report that uses only a few positioned items will still layout correctly, however, even if the fonts used in the Designer and the fonts used in the GRE server differ:
* If the server cannot find a specified font, it does not raise an error; it uses a fallback font instead.
* If no font is specified, a default font is used.
Specify a font at the root of the document, to avoid potentially changing output when a new version of Java, or a different server, is used. In the Report Designer, set the font property for the Page Root node.
Not all fonts contain all possible characters: some fonts will not contain certain glyphs. In this case, GRE will attempt to take the missing characters from a different font that contains the glyphs. For example, the monospaced (fixed-width) font "Courier" does not contain graphics characters. If a report contains a grid that is drawn using graphics characters, GRE might substitute characters from a set that is not fixed-width, causing the layout to break. Avoid this problem by using a font like "Lucida Sans Typewriter", which is both fixed-width and contains the required characters.
Not all fonts can be used for embedding in PDF: the license flag contained in the font might prevent a font from being used. The utility $GREDIR/bin/fontinfopdf lists all fonts that can be used in PDF documents. While True Type fonts generally work, sometimes a Type 1 font will not appear in the list because it is available only as text (.pfa) but not as a binary file (.pfb). In this case, the binary font can be created by using font compilation tools such as pfa2pfb or t1binary from the t1binaries package.
Specific Font Types
Type 1 and Windows TrueType Fonts
Genero Report Engine is capable of reading both Type 1 and Windows TrueType fonts, so that it is possible to simply copy fonts from Windows to Unix. Since the TrueType directories differ from one Linux distribution to another, and between different Unix versions, it is possible to copy the fonts into the Java fonts directory $JAVA_HOME/jre/lib/fonts where they will be found by GRE. In order to check whether GRE sees the font you installed, run the executable $GREDIR/bin/fontinfo which lists all fonts.
Lucida family of Fonts
SUN-Java contains a basic set of fonts (Serif, Sans Serif and Monospaced) in the "Lucida" family. Some distributions of the Java Runtime Environment do not contain all fonts, but it is legal to copy the fonts from one distribution to another as stated in
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/jre/README. These fonts contain a large part of the unicode characters.
The available codes are listed in
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/guide/intl/font.html#lucida.
Liberation fonts
Another option for free fonts is the "Liberation" fonts originally provided by Red-Hat. These fonts have the same metrics (character width) as the Microsoft fonts Arial, Times New Roman, and Courier, and a similar look. These fonts can be installed on both Windows and Linux. A description of the fonts can be found at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_fonts. The fonts can be downloaded at
https://www.redhat.com/promo/fonts.
Asian Fonts
When using Asian fonts in PDF or SVG documents:
* Set the fidelity property to "true" on any WORDBOX or WORDWRAPBOX using Asian characters.
* For reports running in compatibility, set the parameter fidelity to "true" in calls to the API function fgl_report_configureCompatibilityOutput().
Make sure the specified fonts contain the required characters. The designer will display the characters correctly even though the selected font may not contain them; the runtime system does not have this behavior.
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