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

[mpsuzuki]

Dear Mr. George Williams,

Before all, let me note about my current status: at present, I'm
writing some scripts (formerly in Perl, and now in Ruby) for MacOS X
to decode and analyze the contents of "mort", "morx" and "feat".

Thus, soon I can excersize the glyph substition by GX extensions,
aslike "GSUB" of OpenType does.

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?)
were widely used (if used) from now. So I could not decide the order
of importance of GX functionalities. Your note of interest on "fvar"
is informative for me. Thank you.

>>I'm afraid if TrueTypeGX extension were "avoided" due to some
>>problem...?
>
>I'm somewhat off on the side of freetype development so I may not be 
>entirely correct, but I blither on none-the-less...

yes, thanks for your reply!

>I have considered adding an NFNT driver for freetype but have not done 
>so because:
>    * An NFNT (FONT) resource does not contain an easy way of 
>determining whether any given collection of bytes is in fact an NFNT.
>    * I haven't figured out how to write a freetype driver yet.

I'm glad to hear that there were people interested in such subjects.

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?

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.

>As for marukan fonts, I have never been able to find a specification 
>for the 'fbit' resource formats (which appear to have changed over the 
>years). Apple has been encouraging people not to use marukan fonts 
>since before I was aware of their existance and has no posted data on 
>them. If you have a specification for this format I would be very 
>interested in seeing it.

I've never dreamed if people in oversea tried to analize marukan fonts,
I feel very happy. As you've found, the available documentation on fbit
font format is very limited. The documents I refered were only:
[1] Font Manager Reference (InsideMacintosh: Text, Apple)
[2] Fond of FONDS (Technical Note TE21, Apple)
[3] "Resolvable Font Format" (Technote 10004 [Japanese], Apple)
[4] "Font environment in MacOS 8.5"
    (originally titled as: "Marukan fonts will be obsoleted.")
    (Technote 10012 [Japanese], Apple)

also I refered a few Japanese books related to DTP including
a short history of font environment of Macintosh, but most of
them don't provide technical info and often wrong, so I don't
list them.

As original title says, [4] was a document to encourage people
to "sbit" fonts, but its appendix was on marukan fonts, informative.

(other issues will be continued to next post to Mr. Werner Lemberg)

Regards,

mpsuzuki