如何在node.js后端中使用字体？

Question

Background:

I am building a node.js-based Web app that needs to make use of various fonts. But it only needs to do so in the backend since the results will be delivered as an image. Consequently, the client/browser does not need access to the fonts at all in my case.

Question:

I will try to formulate the question as little subjective as possible: What are the typical options to provide a node.js backend with a large collection of fonts?

The options I came up with so far are:

1. Does one install these hundreds or thousands of fonts in the operating system of the (in my case: Ubuntu) server?
2. Does one somehow serve the fonts from a cloud storage such as S3 or (online) database such as a Mongo DB server?
3. Does one use a local file system to store the fonts and retrieve them?
4. ...other options

I am currently leaning towards Option 1 because this is the way a layman like me does it on a local machine.

Without starting a discussion here, where could I find resources discussing the (dis-)advantages of the different options?

EDIT:

Thank you for all the responses. Thanks to these, I noticed that I need to clarify something. I need the fonts to be used in SVG processing libraries such as p5.js, paper.js, raphael.js. So I need to make the fonts available to these libraries that are run on node.js.

Answer 1

The key to your question is

hundreds or thousands of fonts

Until I took that in there is no real difference between your methods. But if that number is correct (kind of mind-boggling though) I would:

1. not install them in the OS. What happens if you move servers without an image? Or move OS?

2. Local File system would be a sane way of doing it, though you would need to keep track manually of all the file names and paths for your code .

3. MongoDB - store file names+paths in the collection..and store the actual fonts in your system . In advent of moving servers you would have to pick up the directory where all the actual files are stored and the DB where you hold the file name+paths.
4. If you want you can place it all in a MongoDB but then that file would also be huge, I assume - that is up to you.

Choice #3 is probably what I would do in such a case.

Answer 2

If you have a decent enough server setup (eg a VPS or some other VM solution where you control what's installed) then another option you might want to consider is to do this job "out of node". For instance, in one of my projects where I need to build 175+ as-perfect-as-can-be maths statements, I offload that work to XeLaTeX instead:

1. I run a node script that takes the input text and builds a small but complete .tex file
2. I then tell node to call "xelatex theFileIJustMade.tex" which yields a pdf
3. I then tell node to call "pdfcrop" on that pdf, to remove the margins
4. I then tell node to call "pdf2svg", which is a free and amazingly effective utility
5. Then as a final step mostly to conserve space and bandwidth, I use "svgo" which is a nodejs based svg optimizer that can run either as normal script code, or as CLI utility.

(some more details on that here , with concrete code here )

Of course, depending on how responsive a system you need, you can do entirely without steps 3 and 5. There is a limit to how fast we can run, but as a server-side task there should never be the expectation of real-time responsiveness.

This is a good example of remembering that your server runs inside a larger operating system that might also offer tools that can do the job. While you're using Node, and the obvious choice is a Node solution, Node is also a general purpose programming language and can call anything else through spawn and exec , much like python, php, java, C#, etc. As such, it's sometimes worth thinking about whether there might be another tool that is even better suited for your needs, especially when you're thinking about doing a highly specialized job like typesetting a string to SVG.

In this case, LaTeX was specifically created to typeset text from the command line, and XeLaTeX was created to do that with full Unicode awareness and clean, easy access to fonts both from file and from the system, with full OpenType feature control, so would certainly qualify as just as worthwhile a candidate as any node-specific solution might be.

As for the tools used: XeLaTeX and pdfcrop come with TeX Live (installed using whatever package manager your OS uses, or through MiKTeX on Windows, but I suspect your server doesn't run on windows) pdf2svg is freely available on github , and svgo is available from npm )