Re: [Devel] anybody working for TrueTypeGX / other Macintosh bitmap font support?

[George Williams]

On 2003.06.18 05:24 address@hidden wrote:
> Now I and my friends are planning to add a support code of
> TrueTypeGX extended tables, and a few other bitmap fonts for
> older Macintosh (e.g. NFNT - Marukan font for CJK), for FreeType.
>
> I've seached the mailing list archive, but I could not find
> many mentions, although recently FreeType on MacOS X is hot
> issues. So I suppose there's nobody working for such, and
> I'm afraid if TrueTypeGX extension were "avoided" due to some
> problem...?

I'm somewhat off on the side of freetype development so I may not be 
entirely correct, but I blither on none-the-less...

FreeType concerns itself mainly with the problem of rasterizing a 
glyph, it is far less concerned about figuring out what glyph to 
rasterize. That problem is left to the user, or to a higher-level 
library (pango, I think). My understanding is that with the exception 
of the 'fvar' (font variation) table, the GX extensions are concerned 
with changing one glyph into another (ligatures, small caps, arabic 
forms, etc.) and are therefore beyond the scope of FreeType.

I think it would be rather interesting to see the 'fvar' table 
supported (this would provide many of the features of multiple master 
fonts), but that (I think) involves messing around in the guts of the 
truetype rasterizer, and is beyond me.

I have considered adding an NFNT driver for freetype but have not done 
so because:
   * An NFNT (FONT) resource does not contain an easy way of 
determining whether any given collection of bytes is in fact an NFNT.
   * I haven't figured out how to write a freetype driver yet.

As for marukan fonts, I have never been able to find a specification 
for the 'fbit' resource formats (which appear to have changed over the 
years). Apple has been encouraging people not to use marukan fonts 
since before I was aware of their existance and has no posted data on 
them. If you have a specification for this format I would be very 
interested in seeing it.