Re: FT2 design question

[Stefan Seefeld]

Werner LEMBERG wrote:
> 
> > Ok, I probably used 'font' in a wrong way.  What I mean is that the
> > scene graph contains the information about the font (in terms of
> > family, point size, weight etc.) but the font renderer/rasterizer
> > which is associated with it depends on with which DrawingKit you
> > render it.  And there is the problem: I can't know just from
> > inspecting the font attributes how a particular renderer mapps the
> > characters to glyphs.  Ligature information and kerning etc. are all
> > optional!  So while I'll cache some default requirements inside the
> > scene graph (I could for example put glues with negative sizes to
> > represent kerning between characters...) I can't really be sure that
> > the exact glyph metrics are preserved among DrawingKits.  The point
> > is really to *try* to use the same font on both, screen and printer,
> > as much as possible.  But without inspecting the DrawingKits this
> > can't be guaranteed.
> 
> I fear that there is no solution to this problem with OpenType fonts
> if you can't use the same font within the scene graph and the
> DrawingKit.

I'm probably just phrasing purely. How would you approach the design
of a WYSIWYG tool, i.e. one which's printed output aims at coming as close
as possible to the onscreen appearance ? Would you try to use the same font
for both (and with font I now mean not only the set of attributes but same
set of glyphs together with auxiliary tables) ? 
What if one is bitmap only (screen) and the other completely vector oriented 
(say, a plotter) ?

Regards,        Stefan
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Stefan Seefeld
Departement de Physique
Universite de Montreal
email: address@hidden

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