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From: | George Williams |
Subject: | Re: [Devel] anybody working for TrueTypeGX / other Macintosh bitmap font support? |
Date: | Wed, 18 Jun 2003 11:49:32 -0700 |
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.
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