PDFKit crashes when providing fonts as Buffer in table cells

[ykw9263]

Bug Report

Description of the problem

When providing font in table cells with a src of Buffer or UintArray, Not a supported font format or standard PDF font. will be thrown.

Upon some digging, I found that in normalizeCell() the font object is deep-merged with other fonts in table styles

pdfkit/lib/table/normalize.js

Line 96 in 2fdafa2

const font = deepMerge({}, colStyle.font, rowStyle.font, cell.font);

This line took an unusually long time to execute, and after this the font src became something like

console.log(font.src)
// { '1': number, '2': number, '3': number, ... }

Code sample

import PDFDocument from "pdfkit";
import fs from "fs";
const doc = new PDFDocument();

doc.table().row([
  {
    text: 'Hello World',
    font: { src: fs.readFileSync(SOME_CUSTOM_FONT), family: FONT_FAMILY },
  }
])

Possible fix

Replace the font deep merge with manual property assignment.
Considering the structure of the font object a shallow merge may also be enough.

// changing to this worked properly in my case
const font = {...colStyle.font, ...rowStyle.font, ...cell.font}

Your environment

• pdfkit version: 0.19.1
• Node version: 24.15.0
• Browser version (if applicable): N/A
• Operating System: Windows 11

[ykw9263]

A workaround is to register the font with registerFont and use the alias in table cell font, like below

import PDFDocument from "pdfkit";
import fs from "fs";
const doc = new PDFDocument();

doc.registerFont(ALIAS, SOME_CUSTOM_FONT, FONT_FAMILY);

doc.table().row([
  {
    text: 'Hello World',
    font: { src: ALIAS },
  }
])

[blikblum]

const font = {...colStyle.font, ...rowStyle.font, ...cell.font}

Please, open a PR with this change

@hollandjake any thoughts?