[Devel] PCL issues and feature requests

[Ian Brown]

I've just finished using freetype to render downloaded PCL fonts. I had to make one small change to the freetype libraray, however, and was wondering if there is maybe a better way of achieving the same thing.

The basic problem is that PCL soft fonts (True Type variety) do not contain a 'name' or a 'post' table. This means that freetype will refuse to load them because they are required tables. I altered freetype to treat these as optional tables and now it all works fine. Is there any way that in a future version of the library, I could specify which tables are optional and hence not have to make the customisation to the library source code.

On another slightly different note, are there any plans for freetype to support Intellifont format fonts. I cannot find the specification anywhere ... but it's pretty low priority anyhow as I haven't yet seen a PCL file that uses this format for a downloaded soft font.

Ian