Text and Fonts

compose2pdf supports rich text styling through standard Compose text APIs, with automatic font embedding for consistent rendering.

Text styling example Text styling example — download PDF

Basic text styling 

renderToPdf {
    Column(Modifier.padding(24.dp), verticalArrangement = Arrangement.spacedBy(8.dp)) {
        Text("Normal text")
        Text("Bold text", fontWeight = FontWeight.Bold)
        Text("Italic text", fontStyle = FontStyle.Italic)
        Text("Bold italic", fontWeight = FontWeight.Bold, fontStyle = FontStyle.Italic)
        Text("Large heading", fontSize = 36.sp)
        Text("Small caption", fontSize = 10.sp)
        Text("Custom color", color = Color(0xFF1976D2))
    }
}

Text decorations 

Text("Underlined", textDecoration = TextDecoration.Underline)
Text("Strikethrough", textDecoration = TextDecoration.LineThrough)
Text(
    "Both decorations",
    textDecoration = TextDecoration.Underline + TextDecoration.LineThrough,
)

Text alignment 

Column(Modifier.fillMaxWidth()) {
    Text("Left aligned (default)")
    Text("Center aligned", textAlign = TextAlign.Center, modifier = Modifier.fillMaxWidth())
    Text("Right aligned", textAlign = TextAlign.End, modifier = Modifier.fillMaxWidth())
}

Spacing 

Text("Wide letter spacing", letterSpacing = 4.sp)
Text("Tall line height", lineHeight = 28.sp)

Overflow and truncation 

Text(
    "This very long text will be truncated with an ellipsis if it overflows...",
    maxLines = 1,
    overflow = TextOverflow.Ellipsis,
)

Text(
    "This text is limited to two lines and will truncate after that...",
    maxLines = 2,
    overflow = TextOverflow.Ellipsis,
)

Fonts

Custom fonts example Custom fonts example (Montserrat via Font(resource), bundled Inter, generic families) — download PDF, source: 14_CustomFonts.kt

Default: InterFontFamily

By default, renderToPdf uses InterFontFamily – a bundled set of static Inter fonts:

Weight Style File
Normal Normal Inter-Regular.ttf
Bold Normal Inter-Bold.ttf
Normal Italic Inter-Italic.ttf
Bold Italic Inter-BoldItalic.ttf

These are embedded and subsetted automatically, so PDFs look the same on every system.

Any font works — automatically

Whatever font Compose lays the text out with is the font the PDF embeds. The renderer captures the exact typefaces from Compose’s font stack during composition, so custom fonts, theme typography, and platform defaults all render with correct glyphs and letter spacing — no configuration needed.

Using a custom font

Supply your own FontFamily — either as the document default or anywhere inside your content (e.g. through your MaterialTheme typography):

val myFont = FontFamily(
    Font(resource = "fonts/MyFont-Regular.ttf", weight = FontWeight.Normal),
    Font(resource = "fonts/MyFont-Bold.ttf", weight = FontWeight.Bold),
    Font(resource = "fonts/MyFont-Italic.ttf", weight = FontWeight.Normal, style = FontStyle.Italic),
)

val pdf = renderToPdf(defaultFontFamily = myFont) {
    Text("Custom font!")
}

Place font files in your src/main/resources/fonts/ directory. The font does not need to be installed on the machine — the loaded font data itself is subset and embedded. Declare every weight/style you use so each renders from a real font file.

Shipping fonts with the app is the most reliable setup for servers. A headless Linux JVM backend needs no fonts installed at all when the FontFamily is loaded from resources — output is identical across dev machines, CI, and production.

Using system fonts

Pass null to use the platform default font instead:

val pdf = renderToPdf(defaultFontFamily = null) {
    Text("Using the system font")
}

The typeface the platform resolves (San Francisco on macOS, Roboto/DejaVu on Linux, Segoe UI on Windows) is embedded via subsetting. Note that output then depends on which fonts the host has installed — bundle the font in resources when you need identical output everywhere.

Font resolution chain

For each text run, the converter resolves the font in this order:

  1. Bundled Inter – Regular/Bold/Italic/BoldItalic (when the text uses InterFontFamily)
  2. Captured typefaces – the exact fonts Compose loaded while laying out this content (covers Font(resource)/Font(file) families and theme typography)
  3. The composition’s Skia font collection – the same lookup Compose’s text shaper uses for system fonts and glyph fallback
  4. Skia’s system font manager, then platform font directories – by family name
  5. PDF standard 14 – Helvetica, Times-Roman, Courier (last resort; never embedded). Substituted glyphs are automatically compressed to fit the space the layout measured, so text can’t overlap, and a warning naming the family is logged.

Variable fonts embed at their default instance only. PDFBox cannot instantiate variable-font axes, so a variable font’s regular (default) instance embeds fine, but instances styled away from the default — e.g. bold of a variable-only font like macOS’s .SF NS — fall back to a compressed standard font. Prefer static .ttf/.otf files per weight (most families, including Inter and Roboto, distribute them).

See also