Re: [Devel] font subsetting and downloading paper

[David Turner]

Hello Sivan,

Sivan Toledo a écrit :
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I would like to call your attention to a paper that I wrote for the
> XFree86 Technical conference. The paper discusses the design
> and implementation of the font subsetting and downloading in
> the printer driver of Qt/X11, which allows WYSIWYG printing
> in KDE.
> 
> The paper suggests that this functionality should reside
> in a standalone library that serves not only Qt but other
> environments. One of the possibilities is to add this functionality
> to FreeType or Xft.
> 
> I would be interested in any thought on this.
>
Thanks for your pointer. I actually too believe that this functionality
should be moved to a different library or service, since it has been
implemented multiple times by different toolkits and applications
(Qt, StarOffice, XPDF and now GnomePrint I believe, to just give a
few examples), of course with different results and limitations in
each case :-(

My point of view is more drastic since I believe that we need to implement
a unified font & type service for Unix systems that should be capable of
providing the following, to be used by any kind of toolkit or application:

  - single programmatic API to list, install and remove fonts
    (die shell scripts, die.. !!)

  - the ability to store font metadata in one or more persistent databases

    (this is critical to access efficient Unicode charmaps, script and
     language support information, certain typographic tables, etc.. from
     a layout engine without re-parsing and re-analysing fonts each time we
     open them)

  - automatic font conversion (for Postscript printing mainly)

  - font embedding (i.e. sub-setting + conversion to CFF or other
    "non-standard" formats)

I call this utopian system "UniType" for now, but I have already started
designing some code for it and should publish a paper on the subject in
the future.

Actually, FreeType Layout isn't done until UniType supports the first
two features listed above, and we're hopefully going to discuss this
topic extensively on Saturday (yeah, that's tomorrow), for the second
FreeType conference in Amsterdam..

We'll probably post a summary of our findings and point of view a few
weeks after the conference..

Regards,

- David