Re: [ft-devel] Understanding Type1 fonts

[mpsuzuki]

Hi,

I wish if this Werner's post is appropriate to continue
the discussion of the font format to be supported by
Fonty Python.

On Wed, 09 Jan 2008 12:07:45 +0100 (CET)
Werner LEMBERG <address@hidden> wrote:
>> Are these worth supporting?  I don't think I have one on my entire
>> Kubuntu system.  What would they be called? "Postscript fonts"?
>
>Well, OpenType fonts (often with extension `.otf') are either based on
>TrueType outlines or PostScript outlines (as CFF).  Then, there are
>pure CFFs, there are Type 42 fonts, etc, etc. Not a trivial topic.

Yet I'm not sure the target application that Fonty Python
manages the fonts for, but considering the fontconfig's
limitation, I think the first group for FP would be the
font files with Unicode interfaces and outline (not bitmap-
only) fonts. So CFF OpenType would be the first candidate.

# fontconfig insists as if it supports bitmap fonts like
# bitmap-only TrueType, BDF, PCF etc, but I'm suspicious
# if fontconfig can extract meaningful data from these
# fonts, except of Roman fonts.

I'm not sure if Type42 (an encapsuled conversion of TrueType
font for PostScript language) is worthful. The handling of
Type42 is similar to Type1 font, so it may easy to support
after Type1 is supported. But I don't know any font package
(or products) including an independent file in Type42 format.

CID-keyed font files should be avoided at present. They
should be used with other files to attach character encoding
interface - they don't have simple Unicode interface.

Regards,
mpsuzuki