[Devel] .afm parsing

[Keith Packard]

I'm looking at ways to replace the custom font support in applications 
like groff and TeX with code based on freetype.  The advantages should be 
clear -- eliminating the many duplicate versions of the same metrics 
information, and the many steps needed to install fonts.

For applications which need only metrics and not the glyphs, it would be 
nice to continue to support fonts which are represented only by .afm files
for which the glyphs are present only in the target device.  Certainly the 
maintainers of these projects won't take code which eliminates support for 
a wide selection of fonts.

So, I'm considering building a complete .afm parser and having FreeType
able to load faces from .afm files.  Such faces would not be able to
generate any glyphs; I think I'd need a face flag that indicates this.

I'd structure the .afm parser so that it could be used as the attachFile
interface for Type1 fonts; it would populate an existing Type1 font with 
the new data, leaving the data extracted from the .pfa/.pfb alone.

Keith Packard        XFree86 Core Team        HP Cambridge Research Lab