Importing Custom Fonts in Thundehead Now

Well this post is related to Thunderhead Now. There is not much information about Thunderhead on internet so thought of writing about recent work I've done.

Here are the steps to install custom fonts :

1. Update your xep.xml file

2. Update fop.xconf file

3. Place the fonts and the modified files under one location(default location is under /default-config/config)
(Location is very important here. if you import (step 4 ) configuration, new files(xep & fop) will be uploaded and your Thunderhead might be referring to old files. See step 6 below.

4. Run the Thunderhead Import Utility. The information on this you can find in one of the PDF tutorials you have got with insallation(on server)

5. To validate the config changes, you can look at table EE_RESOURCES to the time-stamp of config/xml files.

6. If you have used the location(at step 3) other than previous one, you have to login to "the diagnostics site" of the product and change setting of fop & xep renderer to point to correct(relative) path

Issues we faced:

1. After new fonts were visible, old fonts weren't coming up

To fix it we found that old fonts were not there in the installation directory or location we referred in step 3. The fonts would have been initially there when configuration was imported in Thunderhead and later Thunderhead was always referring to Database only. To fix: we put the old fonts back and re-run the Thunderhead Import Utility

2. License Issue (and other configuration missing issue)

It was very challenging to fix. as Thunderhead was now referring to new location(Step 3 above) and we didn't put license.xml or other config files. License.xml was easy to find but we weren't able to find cfg files(may be were deleted from windows app server).
We identified an export config option in diagnostic site (This is part of the product). Used all these config along with changes(fop and xep) and ran the Thunderhead Import Utility

Above issues we faced to utilize fonts in channels like PDF. Other channels like sms, wordml or doc refers to fonts under c:\windows and we don't face issues there.