Re: [Devel] FreeType 2.1.x rejects CMap4 of certain Dyna-Fonts [patch by akito]

[Vadim Plessky]

Hello All,

On Sunday 20 April 2003 00:02, Anthony Fok wrote:
|  Dear all,
|
|  There has been a series of patches made by Akito Hirai of the Japan KDE
|  User's Group, and recently by Firefly in Taiwan, to improve CJK font
|  rendering with FreeType, fontconfig/Xft2, Qt, Pango and Mozilla.
|  Perhaps due to the language barrier, or perhaps due to unfamiliarity
|  with upstream mailing lists, these patches have not made their way
|  upstream yet.  Anyhow, let's get started!  ;-)

I have been once in Taiwan, very nice place!  Unfortunately, I have never been 
in Japan or Korea.
I hope we can overcome language barriers and work together!..

|
|  Akito's KDE font environment enhancement page:
|
|           Introduction:  http://www.kde.gr.jp/~akito/xft/patch_xft.html
|     Download and Usage:  http://www.kde.gr.jp/~akito/patch/download.html
|
|  Firefly's patches and forum:
|
|       http://firefly.idv.tw/test/Forum.php?Board=1
|       http://firefly.idv.tw/setfont-xft/redhat-9.0/ChangeLog.html
|       http://firefly.idv.tw/setfont-xft/redhat-9.0/
|
|  So, let's start with FreeType-2.1.4.  Due to another CMap4 bug in many
|  Dyna CJK fonts, FreeType 2.1.x rejects their Unicode CMap, rendering
|  these fonts unusable.  Akito-san has provided a patch to deal with
|  buggy Dyna Japanese fonts.  Firefly and other Taiwan KDE users have
|  verified that buggy Dyna Chinese fonts became usable with this patch.

I have a question here.
Is it possible to import those Dyna Chinese fonts into PfaEdit, make necessary 
fixes and generate bugs-free fonts?

|  So, please apply the attached patch.  This patch is also available
|  here:
|     
| http://www.kde.gr.jp/~akito/patch/freetype2/freetype-2.1.3-ttcmap4.patch
|
|  It applies cleanly to 2.1.4 too.
|
|  David, Akito-san also worked on the autohinter to make it hint CJK
|  fonts well too, and released a patch last week (updated 2003-04-16).
|  Firefly has also verified it and find it marvellous.
|
|      Before:   http://www.kde.gr.jp/~akito/patch/image/ah-slight1.png
|      After:    http://www.kde.gr.jp/~akito/patch/image/ah-slight2.png
|      Patches:  http://www.kde.gr.jp/~akito/patch/freetype2/2.1.4/

Cool!
Does it improve rendering of non-CJK fonts, too?
Autohinter has problems with certain Cyrillic glyphs, as those glyphs are more 
complex than traditional English/Latin.
As CJK fonts are much more complex than Cyrillic/Greek, I guess users or 
Cyrillic/Greek alphabets would benefit from your work.

|
|  It would be marvellous if you could look into it.  Thanks in advance!
|
|  Anthony

-- 

Best Regards,

Vadim Plessky
SVG Icons * BlueSphere Icons 0.3.0 released
http://svgicons.sourceforge.net