[Devel] Re: Distiller produced PFA problems

[Tom Kacvinsky]

Hi Eric,

On Fri, 19 Jan 2001, Blinn, Eric W wrote:

>
> >
> > Attached is patch that handles the Subrs problem and the FontMatrix
> > problem.  Let me know if it works for you, or if you see any problems
> > with it...
>
> Hi Tom.  I tried the patch and it does get around the missing subrs problem.
> Of course it should come as no surprise that T1_Open_Face() proceeds to
> error out anyway because of the missing charstrings array.  So unfortunately
> the missing FontInfo dictionary still results in FT_New_Face() eventually
> returning FT_Err_Invalid_File_Format.
>

Huh?  The font you sent me has a CharStrings array!  Did you send me the wrong
font?  I am working with the latest CVS version, so if you are using an earlier
version of the code, that might be the cause of the problem...

>
> > The question is this: if there is no FontInfo dictionary in the font,
> > should we add default values?  What should these defaults be?  If we
> > don't add defaults, perhaps we ought to make the return value alongs
> > the lines of FT_Error_Missing_FontInfo and leave it up to the user of
> > FreeType to supply what they think are reasonable values...
>
> Before integrating FreeType into our application, we were using Ghostscript
> to rasterize fonts.  Ghostscript rasterizes the Distiller produced PFA's
> okay, and everything looks alright (at least on the surface).  I took a peek
> at some of the Ghostscript code and documentation.  It looks like they are
> well aware that some Type 1 fonts don't have a FontInfo dictionary.  I can
> see where they have defined a dummy FontInfo, and they may also be
> defaulting some missing data. Something similar in FreeType would be great,
> but at the very least returning an error code along the lines of
> FT_Error_Missing_FontInfo would allow me to try to fill in some blanks and
> make use of what is there.
>

I'll leave this up the the main FreeType guys to decide.  Either way (dummy
values, or allow one to fill these values in) is fine with me...

Tom