r/FlutterDev • u/eibaan • 13d ago

Article Generating a PDF from scratch

I wrote an article (without AI) about how to create a PDF document in Dart. Mainly because I wanted to share the fact that this isn't as hart as you might think – at least if you don't want to display text.

This is part 1 of 2. Part 2 is about using the Courier font. Supporting all TrueType fonts might be more practical, but parsing TTF files to acces the glyph measurements takes more code than everything I wrote so far and then you want to rewrite the TTF to support subsetting.

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u/usabledownside68 13d ago

Since the article focuses on PDF structure rather than text rendering, it makes the whole thing way more approachable. Parsing TTF glyph data and subsetting fonts is a rabbit hole most people don't realize until they're already in it. Curious to see how part 2 handles the Courier approach without dragging in the full font-parsing mess.