iTextSharp Crashes with a StackOverflowException when getting a font

iTextSharp really, really doesn't like it when I try to create Fonts:

FontFactory.GetFont(Font.HELVETICA, 12)

This gives me a user-friendly StackOverflowException. So I tried this:

new Font(Font.HELVETICA, 12)

which does the same thing. Tried Font.TIMES, and got the same thing, too. So I tried dropping a bit lower based on this answer, which suggests the following:

BaseFont bf = BaseFont.CreateFont(
            HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath("/path/to/times.ttf"), 
            BaseFont.IDENTITY_H, 
            BaseFont.EMBEDDED);
new Font(bf, 12);

Once again, StackOverflowException. While the consistency is nice, I'd prefer that the library would let me select a font.

I'm sure I've just got some configuration wrong somewhere; but it escapes me as to what it could be.

I found this article on nabble that suggests creating the font on a separate thread so you have a larger stack to deal with.

FTA

Thread smartCopyThread = new Thread(new ThreadStart(RunSmartCopy),
0x800000);
smartCopyThread.Start();
smartCopyThread.Join(); 

Here, RunSmartCopy would do the work you're describing.