Re: [Devel] .afm parsing

[David Turner]

Hi Keith,

Keith Packard a écrit :
> 
> 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.
>

I think it'd be a good idea. If you have the time to do it right now,
go for it. On the other hand, I plan several updates to FreeType once
2.1.1 is released, and some of them concern the optimisation of text
parsers within the font engine. An AFM font driver could certainly
benefit from this work, though I imagine that changing your code
shouldn't be difficult once it's available as well..

Regards,

- David Turner
- The FreeType Project  (www.freetype.org)