Re: PDFImageRep: Loading fonts at runtime

[Alexander Malmberg]

stefan@wms-network.de wrote:
> Hi folks,
> 
> As some of you may know i'am currently working on an PDFImageRep that
> displays PDF documents without the hassle of using ghostscript for
> rendering. One of my (numerous :-)) problems are embedded fonts that
> are needed to display the document correct. One possibility is to
> install thousands of fonts so that the embedded fonts are not needed
> - this is obviously a very bad solution. I can extract an embedded
> font as Type1 into a file. The question is if it is possible to
> load such a font at runtime, especially with backart on which my
> development is foucsed.

back-art wouldn't have any problems using fonts from memory. However,
there are some architectural problems that need to be solved in order to
support this properly.

In particular, the current backend/frontend split off the font systems
has evolved into a big mess, and I don't want to make it worse by adding
more stuff that doesn't really fit.

FWIW, this is now task 2752:

http://savannah.gnu.org/pm/task.php?func=detailtask&project_task_id=2752&group_id=99&group_project_id=160

It's on my TODO list, but unlikely to happen anytime soon.

- Alexander Malmberg