PDFBox True Type font bold

Question

I'm developing an application that must create a PDF file with different font styles (sometimes bold, sometimes italic and sometimes regular). The Font that I must use is Eras Medium BT (True Type), and I load it using a local file named "erasm.TTF". My question is, how can I draw text in bold or italics using my Eras font file?

I've got a legacy code that uses iText to generate a similar PDF, and to get a bold Font I just need to call this function:

public Font getFontErasMDBTBold9(){
    FontFactory.register(fontPath + "erasm.TTF", "ERASM");
    fontErasMDBT9 = FontFactory.getFont("ERASM", 9, Font.BOLD, Color.BLACK);
    return fontErasMDBT9;
}

Edit: I've seen in other questions that it can be done using different font variants, or artificially by using raw commands. What I want is to use the original font and set some text to be bold, other text italics and the rest just regular.

Is it possible to open a Font in bold style or italic style like in iText?

Answer 1

Thanks for your comments and advices. Finally I used the setRenderingMode method of the PDFPageContentStream class to set the different styles of my text. Here's a private method to write some text with the desired render mode:

private void writeText(PDPageContentStream contentStream, String text, PDFont font, 
                       int size, float xPos, float yPos, RenderingMode renderMode = RenderingMode.FILL) {
    contentStream.beginText()
    contentStream.setFont(font, size)
    contentStream.newLineAtOffset(xPos, yPos)
    contentStream.setRenderingMode(renderMode)
    contentStream.showText(text)
    contentStream.endText()
}

And here is the code to write regular text and bold text.

private void addFrontPage(PDDocument document) {
    PDPage frontPage = newPage()

    PDPageContentStream contentStream = new PDPageContentStream(document, frontPage)

    // Write text
    String text = "This is a bold text"
    writeText(contentStream, text, eras, 18, 25, 500, RenderingMode.FILL_STROKE)

    text = "and this is a regular text"
    writeText(contentStream, text, eras, 9, 25, 480)

    contentStream.close()
    document.addPage(frontPage)
}

Note: The code is writen in Groovy language.