If you’ve ever self-hosted a conversion engine, you’ve seen it: A perfect Word document goes in, and a messy PDF comes out. Lines are truncated, tables overflow, and symbols disappear.
Welcome to Font Hell.
As we noted in our Production Notes for Office → PDF, document conversion at scale is more than just running a command. It’s about ensuring that what your user sees in Word is exactly what they get in the PDF.
In this post, we’ll explore why layout shifts happen and how we’ve tuned office2pdf to provide pro-grade fidelity that standard engines can’t match.
The Culprit: Font Substitution
Most production servers run on Linux. Microsoft Office documents, however, are born in a Windows/Mac world filled with proprietary fonts like Calibri, Cambria, and Segoe UI.
When a standard conversion engine (like a basic Gotenberg setup) encounters a font it doesn’t recognize, it guesses. It substitutes the missing font with a “similar” one like Liberation Sans.
The Result?
- Kerning issues: Character widths differ, causing words to jump to the next line.
- Layout Shifting: A 1-page document suddenly becomes 1.5 pages, breaking your carefully designed headers and footers.
- Broken Symbols: Professional charts and bullet points turn into empty squares.
How office2pdf Solved the Fidelity Gap
When we designed office2pdf, we knew that “good enough” wasn’t enough for US and EU markets. We didn’t just wrap Gotenberg; we re-engineered the rendering environment.
1. Massive Licensed Font Library
We maintain an extensive, legally-compliant library of thousands of fonts. This ensures that when your client uploads a corporate report, our engine doesn’t have to guess. It uses the exact metrics intended by the author.
2. Tuned Rendering Engine
Standard engines often ignore subtle kerning and spacing rules. Our optimized core includes specific patches to the rendering pipeline that respect advanced typography settings, ensuring that table borders and complex charts remain intact.
3. Metric-Compatible Fallbacks
In the rare case a font isn’t found, we don’t just use a random substitute. We use a proprietary metric-matching algorithm that finds a font with identical character widths to prevent layout shifts.
Why Fidelity Matters for Your SaaS
In our Next.js Integration Guide, we showed you how to get running in 5 minutes. But the real value lies in the peace of mind knowing that every document—no matter how complex—will look professional.
“A slightly slower but predictable pipeline is far more valuable than a fast one that fails unpredictably.”
Stop Fighting with Fonts
Don’t waste your engineering hours debugging CSS-to-PDF quirks or installing Linux font packages. We’ve done the heavy lifting so you don’t have to.
Ready for pixel-perfect PDFs? Try office2pdf for free today.
Next up: Security & Sandboxing: How we handle untrusted documents safely.