Re: [Freetype] font catalog

[Vadim Plessky]

On Tuesday 07 August 2001 16:08, Brian Stell wrote:
[...]
|
|   Client side TrueType support will be used by many-many Mozilla
|   Linux/Unix users. Xft is client side TrueType rendering.
|
|   X needs an API to get the language groups that a font is
|   suitable for. Tagging a font as 10646 leaves the app stuck with Han
|   dis-ambiguation which is no simple task. Tagging a font with a
|   standard X encodings prevents large character set fonts. This is why
|   we see utilities to break up a big TrueType font into little character
|   sets (iso8859-1, is08859-4, iso8859-6, etc). Having done this Mozilla
|   is then stuck with having to go to a great amount of effort to try and
|   re-assemble that data (and it is real easy to get it wrong).

I guess you are working in wrong direction. Instead of doing things described 
by you above, what about to create set of fonts which have all necessary 
glyphs?
I guess one pair of Serif /SanSerif fonts will be good start.

In result, 
1) you will have all necessary glyphs 
2) if some character/glyphs is missing (new language, new feature added, 
etc.), you always can add one more glyph.

In this way, there is no need to *disassemble* and than *assemble* fonts  or 
font ranges.

BTW: I see some arguments for using Type1 fonts (not TrueType fonts) on 
Linux/UNIX.
First of all, there are some problems with ByteCode Interpreter patent.
2nd, all printing is done in PostScript (via GhostScript). So, every time 
you print something with TrueType font, it is converted to PostScript.
Automatic conversion just can't be good, by definition. So, pre-converting 
manually, with some manual hinting, TrueType to PS makes sense, in my opinion.
It will improove printing quality and reduce printing speed (and decrease 
rendering speed of PDFs as well)

3rd:  hinting process. If you or somebody else decide to do better hinting 
(as time shows, even famous fonts from leading comnpanies have hinting bugs), 
Type1 is much more easy for hinting than TrueType.
David Turner acknoledged this ;-)
 
-- 

Vadim Plessky
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