freetype-devel
[Top][All Lists]
Advanced

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: [Devel] anybody working for TrueTypeGX / other Macintosh bitmap font


From: George Williams
Subject: Re: [Devel] anybody working for TrueTypeGX / other Macintosh bitmap font support?
Date: Sat, 21 Jun 2003 17:46:32 -0700

Unfortunately, Apple has switched to OpenType before Japanese font
vendors decide to provide cheap TrueTypeGX fonts for Macintosh, so
it's difficult to know which extensions (mort/morx? fvar? trak? opti?)
Apple wants people to switch from mort to morx. Both are currently in wide use (at least in latin fonts). I've never noticed a font with an 'fvar' table (I just like the idea).

I haven't noticed 'trak' tables used, but I haven't really been looking for them so I might just have ignored them.

By 'opti' do you mean 'opbd'? I haven't noticed these used either.

the open source font editor PfaEdit (http://pfaedit.sourceforge.net/) supports
        feat
        kern
        lcar
        morx
        opbd
        prop
(it will read 'mort' tables, but always produces 'morx' on output). If that's any indication of usage.

>    * An NFNT (FONT) resource does not contain an easy way of
>determining whether any given collection of bytes is in fact an NFNT.
Please let me know more about the first problem you found. It means
that we cannot know a given character is included in a given NFNT
before accessing glyph bitmap table?
My understanding of the way freetype works is that the font's data is passed to all drivers loaded into freetype until one is found that "recognizes" the font format. For instance the opentype driver recognizes fonts that begin with 'OTTO'. I am not aware of any easy way to look at an NFNT resource and determine that it is an 'NFNT'. I need to talk to Werner about a way to get around what I perceive to be a problem. Parsing the data is not particularly hard...

By the way, I've already written a script to dump NFNT (FON"D")
content,
but yet nothing for "FONT" resource which I heard as original bitmap
font format of Macintosh.
The 'FONT' resource is in exactly the same format as the 'NFNT', so getting them working should be easy. You never see them any more though.


reply via email to

[Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread]